My Uncharted Story.
Tags: storytelling, machinelearning, selfimprovement
Published: 2021-12-30 13:09:41

_Note: I'm not so great at telling amazing stories like you read in novels, but I guess i'll try my best. To all my book lovers out there, more books to chow down the coming year.
_

**Just a regular conversation about my year 2021.**

After reading the article(more like a year in review), though he doesn't like to call it that) of one of my mentors he's yet to know, please don't spill the beans till I summon courage to tell him "Steve Kolawole". [link to his review here](https://stevenkolawole.medium.com/second-summary-of-my-journals-the-mountains-we-climb-5d1a28a57deb). I decided to give mine a try out as there are few stories I would like to tell about my Journey.

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Just like a few months ago when I started the new year with plans to land a job as an entry level data analyst. So I made plans to work seriously on that, while combining my entrepreneurship journey which I started the previous year 2020. And that year was filled with a lot of setbacks, binged worked for like a month(literally spending nothing less than 20hours coding, reading, and doing research each day), which led to me falling sick for like 3 months, and eventually got my gadgets seized with intense monitoring on the time I spend on my phone, my laptop was basically seized till the end of the year 2020. 

One lesson I picked up was that good health was underrated, so now I try as much as possible to delegate tasks, though it sometimes comes biting you back when you delegate and the person under delivers, doing this so I can have a very good sleep at night. 

Now, back to my 2021 journey, the new year started with me as young analyst and a budding entrepreneur as my team qualified for the hultprize nationals Yay!. All bumped up and filled with great expectations.

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**January**

- Like I said I was all hyped up in January since my team qualified for the 2020 hultprize nationals and we were making plans to travel to Calabar for the event and with that coming along I was making plans landing a role as an entry level data analyst. So regarding the role, with my previous knowledge of excel, took courses that really bumped up my excel skills, and till now I can confidently build ERP applications in excel. _By the way excel is a lot more powerful than we think._ During which I learnt about using macros, power query, pivot tables and data visualization concepts. 

- We were still making plans to go to Calabar and it was quite the stress as my parents said they didn't want me to go by road and had to change plans and budget about how to raise funds for all 3 of my teammates to go by air. A basic summary of my January was all about learning.




**February**

Moving forward to February, at this time did a few projects in excel and still have one pending cos I haven't found time to finish it or lemme say the truth, I generally lost interest in the project. After doing a few excel projects decided excel was a fully wrap and dived into PowerBI, chose BI over tableau because from my research there lots of similarities between Excel and BI.
BI was a breeze for me since I really took time to ground myself in excel pretty well and did projects there with PowerBI. And to my entrepreneurial journey, received a mail around late February, that due to covid-19 regulations the hultprize nationals slated to happen in March in Calabar was cancelled, this was really upsetting but looking back now, I'm grateful it happen as we were able to breeze the nationals as they selected manually and we later got a mail in march that we qualified for the regionals _ more info on that in the story below_


**March - July**

- By March, I decided to take my personal development seriously like I did in 2020, by resuming my reading spree and splurge on books. By reading books about entrepreneurship, personal development (Shoe dog memoire, Ashlee Vance's book on Elon Musk, 5am clock, and a few other which I began for the entire year) and continued working on visualization projects and machine learning competitions. Around June I began my job hunt quest, and it wasn't easy lots of rejections, and qualified for a few and later was dropped off due to location after interviews. I recalled one I had already qualified done the interview was to start work the following Monday and that Saturday I was sent a document to fill which required me to enter my Social Security Number. And that was the beginning of the end of my Job, didn't have one and then reached out to the HR that I was from a Nigeria which doesn't use SSN, not knowing that was the end of my job role, even though the role was a remote one. Later that even she responded that the role was for those who stay within the US even though the role was a remote role. I was completely heartbroken for days after when I was rejoicing that I have joined the ranks of the big boys.
- And regarding my entrepreneurship side of things we did qualify for the regionals which was a stage that involved countries across Africa and Mehn I was hyped and also scared at the same time. The day of the pitch competition at the regionals came and we did come out as having one of the best ideas in the competition, but there was also a Nigerian team there that had a similar idea as my team, so the judges suggested a partnership that would have been a banger and push we two teams to the finals (world stage). It didn't work out well as the team that was told to reach out to us didn't but went behind our backs and added the features of our pitch to their, cos it was more like an open pitch where every team could listen. 

The judges did good though so as not to hurt anyone and make things fair we were both disqualified and another team was promoted to the finals. What they did was more like backstabbing and I was hurt and angry at the same time. Looking back now I'm very much happy that we didn't merge cos their true colors would have eventually shown up, and that set back did put me down up till the point that I became tired of continuing and going on, like things regarding the startup became messy, the team not responding and things going silent it was more of a low and silent period for me. At this point I was contemplating literally taking a break from school, tech and entrepreneurship.


**August**

- By August though I was still applying for analyst roles I took a step back and began reviewing what I wanted to actually do. This month was more of a reflective period for me on my entrepreneurship, tech career, well as for school was just moving through it all. Registered for another competition in school Spirit of Enterprise and came out in the top 4 in the competition, it was a real boost then. Then came the setback which was a member of the team telling me he wanted to drop off to focus on his final year in school, I supported him but it sent my already delicate entrepreneurship career into another point of reconsidering do I stop or continue. It got to a point when I had talks with my cousin and told him about everything, he was willing to support me taking a break for at least a year and landing a good job and joining him outside, sounded like a pretty good idea to me back then, this young man didn't take it up though. 

- In regards to my tech career I was still applying on the side but not as intensive as before cos, just me taking up personal projects and getting to review my career choice of which I eventually decided to go for what I really wanted. 

- Now that I recall, I wanted to go ahead of myself by submitting an application to Ycombinator🤣🤣🤣🤣, me I was trying to chill with the big boys with an idea that was capitally intensive and not sustainable in Nigeria which I realized later towards the end of the year in an incubators programme I qualified for. The rejection mail came in but it was softer as they gave their comments on my application. I then applied to a Nigerian University focused incubators programme Inqumax, though I reluctantly applied but it became the best thing that happened to me towards the end of the year.


**September**

- At this time I came to understand that my background in SWE wasn't great, as my goal was to transition from being a data analyst to ML Engineering. Took a gradual turn off from ML competitions and slowly restarted the whole process which had me learning python all over again😢😢😢. And mehn it was one hell of a struggle for me. But I'm glad I did and reading books on core concepts in computer science, as a lot of people who are getting started in ML think they don't need to understand ML concepts but this year proved me wrong as I had to pause and restart my journey with SWE involved. Have been able to build projects like bots with python, then also working with APIs while building trading algorithms. Did a small trade algorithms that computes the amount of stock a person can buy based on their portfolio size and a number of cool python projects though they can't get me a fulltime job but come in handy along the way.

- And towards the end of September, had my qualifying pitch for my entry into the incubators programme and I qualified. little did I know that I just signed up for three months of intensive work, but overall it was very much worth it.

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Now looking at it I think I really had a long year, time to wrap things up and summarize the rest of my year.

**October - December**

- At this point I was fully focused on consuming knowledge on software engineering and reading articles on Machine Learning and taking courses on mathematics of machine learning while building on my SWE skillset and with very much less of machine learning except when I had to prepare for the bootcamp , I only made one submission that allowed me to qualify and when people ask for help with working on their models, aside that it was more of learning and coding in python. 

- Regarding my entrepreneurship career, my programme with Inqumax commenced in October and it was one of the best things that happened to me, having mentors like Henry Ukoha, Benjamin Udokwu and Cynthia Chisom, who were always there to guide me through the process of refining my idea, the programme was great but the deliverables were challenging and it forced me to learn how to overly plan and prioritize my activities to the very extreme, as I always wanted to meet up with the deadline and then it brought me out of my comfort zone and gave me to an extent the ability to share my startup idea and goals before anyone.

- I recall a time during the programme an investor was brought in for a demo pitch and after doing my pitch she literally rubbished my whole idea, though she was right but it did make my mood for the entire week end very bad. Imagine having someone rubbish all you spent a lot of time refining, even though she gave valid point it got to me.

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<u>**Highlight of my wins**</u>

- Deciding to restart my whole ML career with software engineering in focus. Though it initially seemed tough but I'm grateful I did.

- Volunteering to become very active in the DSN and GDSC community. This was a great opportunity to meet indirect mentors that helped motivate me and push me to keep going.

- Joining Inqumax incubator's programme. This so far has been one of my biggest wins this year. As it has helped build my time management, people skills and confidence in approaching challenges.

- Refining my idea into becoming a semi-startup. Yeah I'm almost at that step where I can call myself a founder, been a very long three months of hard work that paid off. The startup is focus on building solutions for the agricultural sector.

- Getting to understand the agricultural sector and first hand interact with those in the space. Joined PARI(Program of Accompanying Research for Agricultural Innovation) workshop in November and enjoyed the discussion with them about the future of Agriculture in Nigeria. Also joined Farmcrowdy's anniversary event where important discussions regarding the challenges of the agricultural sector in Nigeria and what are the next steps to achieve improvement.

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**Lessons learnt so far** 

- I've learnt never to hold onto people so much that you can't let them go or do without them as life happens, one might not understand the reasons why they are making such decisions. This was as a result of me losing 2 teammates out of 4 of us this year, it was tough balancing the workload but well we move on.

- Starting tech career all over again with SWE in mind was daunting but it made the journey clearer and faster.

- Never to advice anyone just getting started in ML to think about doing ML engineering without SWE in focus, it eventually pays off.

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Found out I never had a social life this year, trying to improve on that next year and open to meeting new intelligent minds to have brilliant conversations with.

Glad I met up with new friends or people I became much closer to.

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**New year milestones**

- Becoming a ML engineer building E2E projects that are also decentralized (literally merging ML engineering with blockchain).

- Contributing to opensource much more.

- Landing a full-time role by mid-next year.

- Working on onboarding at least 500 signups for my startup.

- Attending Tech Events and Meeting new friends.

- Speaking at one tech event before the end of the year.

- Investing in setting up my workspace.

- Dedicating more time to having fun and twitter memes to cool off.

_Let see what this new year brings and how we can go about it. Fully into smashing big milestones._