Thank your for sharing your honest and detailed career path! Full of bends, unexpected rocks, steep hikes…
Only could you if possible elaborate on your transition to IT/tech? You mentioned that you applied for jobs as data analyst.
Did you start learning coding, data analysis, DevOps...? IT is extremely wide and I also think that nobody should be scared of giving it a try because there’s always a niche they will enjoy. How was your experience and what branch of IT have you focused on?
The stats classes I took in grad school typically had problem sets in R, so I learned that as needed.
I got better at it in summer 2016 when I used it for the paper I worked on.
The first real job I got in tech was doing technical support for academic researchers who were using a computational reproducibility platform, so knowing a bit of R and being able to pick up enough of the other languages to get by—mostly some shell scripting and package installation commands in Python/Julia/etc. -- was helpful.
I didn’t really approach learning code systematically. I tried a few times to take online coding and data science classes but never finished any of them. Apparently I do my best learning ‘just in time.’ (A lovely phrase, I think, hinging on the many meanings of ‘just’.)
The data analyst job I got was in an R shop. If I had been more motivated by the problem and a better fit at the company, I might still be doing that.
Thank your for sharing your honest and detailed career path! Full of bends, unexpected rocks, steep hikes… Only could you if possible elaborate on your transition to IT/tech? You mentioned that you applied for jobs as data analyst. Did you start learning coding, data analysis, DevOps...? IT is extremely wide and I also think that nobody should be scared of giving it a try because there’s always a niche they will enjoy. How was your experience and what branch of IT have you focused on?
Hi Victoria, thanks for asking! In sequence:
The stats classes I took in grad school typically had problem sets in R, so I learned that as needed.
I got better at it in summer 2016 when I used it for the paper I worked on.
The first real job I got in tech was doing technical support for academic researchers who were using a computational reproducibility platform, so knowing a bit of R and being able to pick up enough of the other languages to get by—mostly some shell scripting and package installation commands in Python/Julia/etc. -- was helpful.
I didn’t really approach learning code systematically. I tried a few times to take online coding and data science classes but never finished any of them. Apparently I do my best learning ‘just in time.’ (A lovely phrase, I think, hinging on the many meanings of ‘just’.)
The data analyst job I got was in an R shop. If I had been more motivated by the problem and a better fit at the company, I might still be doing that.