Stepping Stones into Data Science
I love being a teacher, and as most teachers will tell you, we also love learning as much as sharing our knowledge. Naturally, in early 2020 when I found myself stuck in India for 5 months during the lockdown for Covid-19, I loved the sudden burst of downtime. Initially, I was speeding through my reading list with the likes of Asimov’s Foundation and William Gibson’s Neuromancer- which seemed fitting given the dystopian vibes we were having in the world at the time.
Previously, I’d never really enjoyed programming, and in university, when sitting in the basement computer labs in the JCMB in Edinburgh and trying to complete some programming assignment for my MATLAB course, I can’t say inspiration grew there either. I didn’t really see the point or the power of computer programming — I know that seems dumb to say, given I’ve a Bachelor’s in Physics and a Master’s in Sustainable Engineering — or how it applied to the day to day lives of people. Honestly, the programming part of my degrees were rather dull. It wasn’t until I came across an amazing podcast called Banana Data that my interest really began to grow in the field of data.
Reading and listening to some great data scientists really sparked my interest in trying to learn the methods for myself. If you are getting into Banana Data now, I would totally recommend starting from the beginning because you really get to hear them discuss the evolution of many technologies over the course of the last few years. What really stuck out for me was predictive text in Gmail. In 2019, when the first episodes were released, they do a post on how surely it won’t be great and in the next year we hear them in awe at how good the predictive text had become! When industry experts are amazed, it really shows you how much more we still have to discover about the power of data.
For those readers who are interested in learning more about how data is dealt with in the real world, I would recommend checking out Risky Talk which I like as it discusses everything from strategies during Covid that combat fake news to increasing data literacy for members of the British cabinet. And for those who want to dig a little deeper into the industry, I’d give Data Skeptics a listen. It’s one of those podcasts that has me jotting down terms for later research.
After a solid couple of weeks of reading, watching plenty of YouTube clips and listening to podcasts, I started trying out various online courses in a myriad of topics. These ranged from digital marketing, a topic I knew nothing about, to brushing up on my programming skills for data science, something I’d mostly ignored since my undergraduate days. This was all the beginning of my journey to Data Science.
