What I learned this week. Week 1.
Tags: datascience, nlp, weeklyretro, python
Published: 2022-02-27 17:01:54

This is going to be a new thing I do every week where I go over what I learned this week as a Data Scientist attempting to get my first job. Don't expect the most technical take on it as this is more to map out my thought process and put it into words. 

### Wednesday:

I know, its crazy we are starting with Wednesday instead of Monday. But personally, blogging this isn't something I am comfortable with.
So we skipped the first couple of days for a few reasons but most importantly because I didn't feel like it. Anyways for learning today I started as I do everyday, with reading. Currently working through "Atomic Habits" By James Clear and am loving it. Just about every time I read a chapter I find myself not only being called out on what I do to hinder myself on a day to day basis, but am given strategies on how to live my life to serve my future self. Today I learned about the mismatch between immediate and delayed rewards. After reading I went ahead and started the rest of my day with a little networking and applying to a few jobs while attempting to connect with people that work at those companies. As of now, no luck, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna slow down. I know that if I continue being consistent, I will start to get interviews, and interviews leads to job opportunities. After lunch I followed up with learning how to create my own basic pipeline for a natural language processing model. This was my first look into NLP and it was a lot of fun. I found out how to compute term frequency and inverse document frequency and apply them to provide actionable intelligence.

### Thursday

Today started a little different. Instead of my morning routine I was awoken by my brother looking for his cat Sage. After a couple minutes looking I was able to find him but he was screaming in pain when I tried to move him. I felt his tummy and he was quite bloated so I checked his heartbeat. His heart was beating around 80 beats per minute which if you know cats, isn't good. I told my brother to bring him to the vet right away. The vets declared that he had a blocked urinary tract and needed a catheter. Now he is on his way home and needs to be monitored for the next 24 hours. I didn't end up applying for jobs after the hectic morning and the stress of not knowing if Sage would be okay. But I did end up learning more about NLP and specifically NLTK the Data Science package that is most widely used for NLP. I also had a bit of regex review in order to help with cleaning up text data. 

### Friday

I slept in today. After yesterday I have been anxious and ended up tossing and turning most of the night so sleeping in seemed like a decent idea. I don't let sleeping in get in the way of my morning routine, I just simply push it back and have my day start later. I applied for a few more jobs and reached out to a recruiter at one of them. Still no responses from any recruiters, but I do get responses from fellow Data Scientists willing to answer any and all questions I might have about their job and what they do. It helps me know I am in the right field as I too get excited to talk about my work. After my networking time block I had a scheduled hangout time with my wonderful autistic cousin Sam. We had a blast watching some of his favorite anime, Overlord and Shield Hero. After heading back home I decided to review what I had learned about NLP so far this week and now here I am talking about it. 

If you are still here awesome. Like I said in the beginning, this is for an audience of one. However I appreciate the support and encourage you to follow along as I continue to record what I learn and go through each week as I strive to break into my career as a Data Scientist.