What I learned this Week. Week 4.
Tags: datascience, nlp, weeklyretro
Published: 2022-03-20 16:04:08

Welcome back to another week. If you happen to be new, I am working towards getting a job as a Data scientist. This is where I go through each day and record what I did that day, and how I felt about it. This is mostly for me, but I want it out there in case it may help another. 

### Monday
Today was a great day. Woke up early to bring my dog into the Vet. Which if you are back from last week you would be happy to know Jake is doing much better. We got some over-the-counter meds and he stopped pooping so much. We still brought him to the vet today, got the all clear and came home with some antibiotics just to make sure he's cleared up. I am anxiously waiting to hear back about my interview but also know I wont hear back for a minute. I started my new book finally. I ended up just showing up to my reading time most of the week last week. In other words I opened the book up, took a look at the page number, checked a headline or two, then shut the book. This is to create the habit of reading in hopes I will continue to learn about more than just Data science. Speaking of which, I hoped back onto the NLP train and learned about how to classify text. I found out text classification is similar to other classification problems but just take a lot more work to process the data. 

### Tuesday
Today was good. Nothing too eventful happened today but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I woke up feeling great, had a great morning. I felt motivated and didn't let the distractions of my life affect me. I continued my new book, applied for jobs and worked on my NLP learning. I learned exactly what word embeddings are and how to interpret them. I look forward to learn more about how to find and create my own word embeddings.

### Wednesday
Today was a little longer. Woke up feeling groggy. Pushed my snooze button a few too many times. I pushed through my laziness and finished my morning routine including my short workout and stretch, both of which I find the hardest to do on days like today. But doing them also feels the most rewarding. I decided to try and work outside today as we actually have a high of 65 up here in Michigan. It was beautiful and definitely helped get my spirits up. I found it harder to make comments and interact with others on Linkedin today as well. I didn't want to waste my day though, so instead of doing my normal work, I decided to look into a bit more about mental health and ADHD as a whole. This helped me gain some insights into myself and that I don't need to be hard on myself for days like this.

### Thursday
Another good day out of today. Ended up waking up a little earlier and having a quiet early morning with my cats. I did break out in hives on my hand while making breakfast. Took me by surprise and I still have no idea what the cause was, but I just threw on some (probably expired) hydrocortisone cream and called it good. I set to work and did some review of basic statistics. My go-to resource for relearning basic statistics is [StatQuest](https://statquest.org/video-index/). Bam. Everything is so clearly explained and is honestly fun to listen to. If you need help with anything data analysis related, I highly recommend checking this channel out. I also used gensim's model Word2Vec to create my own model and find out more on how NLP does its thing. 

### Friday
Finally at the end of the week, and today was a good day. I was a little slow going at first. Took a while on my shower, stretched for an extra 10 minutes, etc.. Afterwards I sent out some outreach emails. One to the wonderful HR manager at TSPi (where I had my interview last week), and the others to some recruiters regarding a couple positions that they brought to my attention. Composing these emails of course takes a while for me. I like to make things perfect the first time, especially when it has to do with if I would get the job or not. But I just need to keep reminding myself that mistakes are learning opportunities, not just about being a failure. The more often I work on writing and becoming comfortable with the idea of "selling myself" without coming off as cocky and arrogant, the better I will be at it. Switching lanes to data science, I learned more about NLP and specifically some unsupervised learning using Keras. I already have some experience with Keras so it was a lot of fun.

I hope you enjoyed this week as much as I did. And I hope to see you back here for next week.