A journey — the beginning
With one more month to go in the Digital Academy course and head heavy with newly acquired knowledge I decided to write another story. How are we doing? Pretty well, I would say. We all now have officially approved the outlines of our projects and can start working on them.
The first story I wrote the next day after first career workshop, where we received very valuable insights about our CVs, yesterday we had the second career workshop. We discussed how to present ourselves online/real life, how to create a good LinkedIn profile and of course, what questions to expect on the job interview for TECH positions. We also had a nice visitor, Tomáš Papež from ROI Hunter (an advanced performance marketing platform for Facebook and Instagram ads, designed by digital marketing and e-commerce experts, to automate and scale your business, taken from their LinkedIn site). He told us about the company, how the IT field is changing rapidly and also some nice hints to help us orientate in the field and what we can do next after we are finished with the Academy. He was also exposed to quite o big dose of girly humor, which he was able to respond to in kind and even found it funny (big thumbs up for that! facing a bunch of overworked girls armed with sarcastic humor can be a scary thing).
But first thing first, after the first career workshop came one of the most important parts of this course: Meet your Mentor. It took part in a bistro; the atmosphere was very relaxed and casual. The mentors presented themselves, some were unfortunately missing, and one run in late, because he was simultaneously teaching at a faculty nearby (thumbs up for showing up 😉). Then came the fun part — speed dating. Running from one table to another up and down the stairs (the bistro had an underground part), standing in a cue and trying to express my ideas as fast as I could and failing miserably (5 poor girls waiting for me to finally stop talking, ugh). It was so much fun, I applaud the girls for this idea. Most of the girls stayed after the speed dating ended and talked, drank and had even more fun… the ones who stayed were also rewarded by knowing who their mentor is before the ones who left. I must say I am very happy with the outcome, my mentor Miloš Minařík is an awesome person, not only clever, supportive and willing to help, but also witty and fun to be around.
The project, I had the idea and the data even before the Meet your Mentor evening, I knew what I wanted to do with the data, that I want to implement Machine Learning models. It caught the eye of my mentor, who found the idea interesting, Machine Learning is also one of the voluntary courses which he teaches. But no more about the project, I will post the final version of it here (posting our project online is compulsory for finishing the course).
After Meet Your Mentor came introduction to Data Analysis, where we learnt statistic basics, how to think about the data and also tried to have some fun with R studio. Next week came the first excursion to the companies supporting Digital Academy — Moravia IT. We learnt about the company, about open positions, had the tour around the office (very nice place indeed) and also took part in a voluntary course about data warehousing. Unfortunately, I could not take part in another excursions with companies Intelligent Technologies and Dataweps (work and illness getting in the way).
We spent a nice Saturday diving into the SQL, with awesome lector Roman Baroš. The course was very hands-on, we went through tons of exercises, where we wrote the commands ourselves (in comparison to working with RStudio, where the exercises were already written, and we only run them), which for me was crucial to stay alert all the time. Then we started with Python, for me the most crucial moments of all, because I initially fell in love with the programming language. We started with prep course lead by Kačka Brabcová (another awesome lector, who attended the Digital Academy earlier in the year), learning the basics of the code, syntax, the logic behind the code… after the course I went home and could not stop thinking about it, I finished the homework in like 10 minutes and felt so proud (there is yet nothing to be proud of, but it made me extremely happy, the fact, that I understand: D).
On the weekend we had a course focused on Data cleaning with lector Zuzana Bednářová (from Keboola), who brought very interesting (and important) insights into the life of a data analyst, what difficulties data they encounter every day and what joys can we look forward to. The Sunday we spent with Python and mentor Ondra Veselý (CEO of FlowerChecker, amazing app for plant identification service, also data analyst at Kiwi), polishing our skills and learning new ones.
I would be lying if I said that everything till now was a piece of cake, yesterday I spent half of the day trying to install Anaconda and Spyder and make them run properly, while googling furiously the reason why matplotlib is not working and how to fix it… but YES I succeeded and every obstacle, that I manage to overcome, brings me closer to my dream career in TECH. And I would be lying too, if I said I do not enjoy every single bit of this period of hard-core speed learning, meeting awesome people and working on being better every day!
As the title says, this is just the beginning of a long journey to get where I want to be… but enjoying the journey is as important as getting to your *final* destination, isn’t it?
