From Economics to Data Science
Hi everyone, my name is Kueila Cristina and I am going to make a quick intro about myself and my career path so far and my growing interest in data science.
Born in Cape Verde in 1992, where I finished my 12th grade on Science and Technology area in Sal island, then I wanted to try something new and gain new perspectives and opportunities, so I moved to Portugal in 2011 to get my degree. In this journey, I have always brought homesickness, carried by the sense of responsibility and learning that the new life would bring me, the same fundamental aspects that have made me grow as a person.
I chose to graduate in Business Science because it combines two areas that I always liked: math and business since I was 12 years old, I helped my mom in her groceries store, managing sales and stock, it was right there that I gain interest in the business area. So I chose to get my degree in Business Science in Escola Superior de Tecnologias e Gestão de Felgueiras.
After getting my degree in 2015, I was excited about the economy and the world of finance and banking, so I decided to get my Masters in Economics, however, due to financial difficulties, I stopped studying for two years to work and get financial conditions to continue my studies. I worked as a waitress, and it was a very positive and enriching experience as it helped me work on my teamwork, communication and work ethic skills.
In 2017, I finally started my Master degree in economics, and it was concluded in October 2019. During this time I was trying to find my first job opportunity so I could learn and gain experience, but with no luck.
Fortunately, I joined my friend Caio Martins who was freelancing with projects, which dwelled with some techniques/tools like excel to solve financial, economics and marketing tasks until February 2020 which, unfortunately, due to COVID we didn’t have more projects so we have to search for alternatives.
I felt that I needed to gather what I learned in my academic path and on freelancing and create a new opportunity for myself. During this period of reflection and exploring, I gained a strong interest in statistical data analysis, but I wanted to do something related to Python.
Python is a programming language used for web development, Data Science and Machine learning. It is well known by its versatility, portability and library support. By those advantages and its community feedback, from a statistical data analysis point of view I decided to use Python as my tool for data analysis.
So, for starters, I did not know how to code, I mean I dabbled with some HTML but not something of much value. I was really out of my comfort zone. But I kept pushing with resources found on Python tutorial, Dataschool, Geeksforgeeks, and Udemy Courses which dive into concepts from the basics to more in-depth Data Science but focused on data analysis and machine learning.
Even though with no coding experience and the need for a breath of fresh air on my career path options, I decided to shift to Data Science by self-learning. It has been a challenging experiencing, but the fact that by using data science to solve problems, analyze data by my own it has been a very rewarding experience which validates my decision to have chosen this path.
The feeling of challenging myself, keep pushing and for your goals and being resilient has made me grow as a person and increased my will of getting of my comfort zone.
Talking about getting out of my comfort zone, I also decided to share my experience through Medium. Since I have a lot to learn in this field I wanted to share this experience so that people that might be going through the same situation, there are still options and its never too late and if you keep pushing yourself the feeling of pride is very rewarding.
By that, I will be posting blog posts of my projects that I been experimenting with new tools, new techniques and the experience I’ve been gaining by coding.
As for a starting point, my main topics of study will be focused on marketing and finance, specifically on customer retention and sales analysis. My goal is to understand Data Science, Machine learning in-depth and combine with my Economics background.
As for my “Getting started with Data Science by cleaning up data sets”, my goal was to use a dataset and show techniques use to clean up the data.
Feel free to comment and leave feedback, since this still pretty fresh and I have a lot to learn. For that, here’s my LinkedIn profile link. Thank you all for your time and I see you soon.
References
https://www.python.org/about/apps/
https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/
