Why Data Science?
I was on a car ride with my parents, on the way to have our dinner. As an Asian parent, my Dad questioned, “so which course for your diploma?” I was stunned. I have always had a habit to answer right away what’s on my mind and I said “Mechanical Engineering”. I had always and am still in love with cars and how you can move from 1 point to another in a shorter period of time in a block of steel and aluminum and also, can be decorated and enhanced!
He had a short answer that made my heart tumble, “What would you end up as? A mechanic on a workshop by the roadside?” Long story short, both my parents are in the line of business, small to medium-sized ones. Thus, seeing his son having a job might seem out of the world. What I had in mind was working under some car factories as one of the top engineers and maybe designing some cool cars that would be used by the public. That was the dream, of course. Shortly after, he suggested, “Why not accountancy? You have always been scoring well in Math and we have businesses to run. Give it a thought”. I kept quiet for a while in disappointment.
After some thoughts, discussions, and hearsays, I thought Computer Science (CS) was the safest choice since I had been quite tech-savvy and Asian (or at least my parents) love to see the children in tech. However, it didn’t end there. I just found out there are branches out of CS itself such as Cybersecurity, Data Science, Game Design, Software Developer, etc. I took on Cybersecurity since it looked cool in the movie and some of my friends said it was one of the top fields to enter. I managed to get into that course and actually I knew nothing much about it.
The duration of my diploma was three years. It was a hell of a nightmare. I had to pull all-nighters throughout those years since I totally knew nothing about that field and I didn’t like it at all. I thought it was going to be a walk in the park. I had to always bang my head and pulled some energy drinks to dig through the textbook right before almost all the tests. However, there were some subjects that I remembered excelling without putting much effort, they were SQL and Maths.
From there, I looked up for information on what specializations have more focus on SQL and Maths. I am quite lucky to be born in the “Google everything” era. Data science appeared right away. From then onwards, I decided to be more focused on this field by taking a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science with a major in Big data.
It was definitely not an easy journey. A lot of lessons and headaches, of course. But I think it was worth it. I am lucky enough to be able to land a job as a Data Analyst in the pandemic where everybody struggled to land a job and companies decided to cut the number of employees ever since productivity is slower than before.
I am going to share more about my journey and some bits of knowledge in the field of Data Analytics hoping to help more people towards entering this field.