About Me — Andreas Martinson
Love working in data science and healthcare, passionate about both. Enjoying writing about interesting topics.
Hello everyone 👋 My name is Andreas Martinson and this is my About Me page.
Table of Contents
- Why I Decided to Write on Medium
- My Bio
- My Career Journey — Starting College
- My Career Journey — Switching from Accounting to Data Analytics
- My Career Journey — My First Job as a Data Analyst
- My Career Journey — Switching from Data Analyst to Data Scientist
- My Career Journey — Learning to Code
- My Interests, Passions, & Hobbies
Why I Decided to Write on Medium
I thought I would start by saying why I decided to write. I will keep this part short so I can share more about my journey below, but feel free to skip sections.
I have been a part of the Medium community since 2017, which is when I took a “Data Wrangling and Visualization” at BYU-Idaho where the professor referenced a Medium publication called Towards Data Science. Those articles, as well as many others, have helped me to get my current job. I wanted to start creating content to hopefully provide that same value for others and also to motivate myself to constantly learn and share that progress with others.
I am looking forward to connecting with more of you and getting feedback on my content as well as answering any career-related questions you might have. I also post frequently on LinkedIn if you want to connect and stay up to date on my content.
My Bio
I currently live in Washington state with my beautiful wife and 2 kids (also beautiful). I work every day as a data scientist in healthcare. I love my job and am fortunate enough to already have my dream career. I got my bachelor’s degree in Accounting in 2018 from BYU-Idaho and my Master’s in Biomedical Informatics in 2021 from the University of Utah.
I am 28 years old and grew up in Washington state. I’m the second oldest of four boys. I grew up in Washington, but I was born in Goteborg, Sweden. Swedish was my first language, but since I moved to the US when I was 5 and we didn’t speak Swedish at home after moving, I inevitably forgot. Now I have this interesting situation where I understand more Swedish than I can speak (I’ve heard others have similar experiences to this when forgetting their native tongue).
My family was middle to lower class growing up. My Dad was a salesman and with that line of work it can be ‘feast or famine’. The income is just not very consistent working on commission. He switched jobs frequently since many companies would lay off the sales staff as soon as they don’t meet quota or if they had to cut their budget. My Dad was always a top performer and when the company downsized, he was typically the last one to get laid off.
My Dad even had to work a paper-route in addition to his full-time sales job. My older brother would get woken up in the middle of the night in high school to go with my dad to go deliver newspapers. Having our water shut off happened way too frequently. Fortunately, we had very generous friends, family, and church community that helped us get through those tough times.
In addition to our financial issues, my family also had health issues growing up. When I was younger, my Mom had chronic back pain. Due to the health issues and financial issues, our family filed for bankruptcy but thankfully kept our house. Before filing bankruptcy, my Mom had to take a secretary job in high school to help pay the bills.
I know that a lot of younger millennials my age might have had similar experiences as a teenager. I was 15 when the 2008 recession hit and our family was no exception from being affected.
Around the time we filed for bankruptcy and when I was a teenager, my Dad was diagnosed with a type of blood cancer called myelofibrosis. His diagnosis didn’t affect our family much for the first 13 years, besides him going in for a quarterly checkup. Eventually, his blood cancer progressed enough that he had to have a bone marrow transplant. He got his transplant about 3 years ago, which resulted in my Mom becoming his caregiver despite her own health issues. When you see others ‘fighting’ cancer, it’s typically when they go through transplant or start chemo. Before that, you might not notice the events that lead up to that point since they might not be as noticeable.
After battling cancer and getting sick multiple times and recovering, my Dad died 2 months ago from COVID. Since he was immune-compromised, his body didn’t have much to fight back. My Mom was so diligent in sanitizing everything all the time and they both wore masks whenever they went out of the house. My family was quarantining years before COVID hit. Despite all of the effort, COVID was one of those diseases that he didn’t avoid and was the one illness that ended up proving too much for him.
Anyway, my point in mentioning my experiences and pasts situations is to help others know that I can relate to some of what they are going through. Life is tough, but it’s easier when we have others to relate to and lean on for support.
My Career Journey — Starting College
My experiences when I was younger definitely influenced my career choices. When I started college, like most kids, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. Some people postpone starting college until you’re sure you what you want to do, but I actually would suggest starting college when you’re only partly sure what you want. You have two years of generals to figure it out; and in my opinion, you should be using your electives to take introductory classes to help you figure out what you want to do for your career instead of using all your electives on overpriced bowling, swimming, or guitar lessons.
My declared major was Business Finance when I first began. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to be in business (whatever that meant). After a semester, I changed my major to Accounting since this was a less ambiguous direction and seemed like a safe career choice where I wouldn’t get laid off as often as my Dad was growing up.
Quick side note: My Dad did end up finding a company that he worked with for a longer period of time and that he really enjoyed. He ended up earning enough money to be considered upper middle class. The financial situation for my family improved shortly after I left the house.
You might be wondering how I got from Accounting to Data Scientist in healthcare, so I’ll do my best to explain the decision points that lead me to where I am.
My Career Journey — Switching from Accounting to Data Analytics
While I was in Accounting I was considering what type of Accounting role I fit in with most; should I be a tax accountant, audit accountant, or forensic accountant? I eventually found myself wondering if there are any data analytics-focused accounting paths. Around the same time, I was actually considering leaving Accounting since I had gone through an internship and didn’t really find the work as challenging or enjoyable as I had hoped.
Despite considering switching degrees my Junior year and having my ‘mid-degree’ crisis, I got my bachelor’s degree in Accounting in 2018. It was actually in one of my Accounting classes where I was introduced to coding. I was taking an advanced Excel course where we learned a programming language specific to Excel called ‘VBA’. It’s basically every business major’s ‘gateway drug’ into the programming field.
After that course, I was determined to pivot my career and study data analytics. Soon after, I took another course on business analytics and loved it. Then I postponed graduation for a year so I could take plenty of data science courses before I graduated. I also was waiting for my wife to graduate and tuition was relatively cheap compared to other schools, so I thought I would take more courses to pivot into my new career interest.
My Career Journey — My First Job as a Data Analyst
My senior year of my Bachelor’s I took a ‘Data Wrangling & Visualization’ course. This course is what really helped me solidify my switch to data analytics and also ignited even more of a passion to pursue it as my career. I learned so much in this class, which was based mainly on the R programming language (I now use Python though). It was through this class that I heard about an internship opportunity at Intermountain Healthcare as a data analyst.
When I heard about this opportunity, I was really excited. Even when I was studying accounting, my goal was to work in the healthcare industry. Due to my experiences as a kid watching my parents go through challenges in healthcare, I was really motivated to get a job in this field. I felt like the healthcare field was ripe for improvement and data science was a great career to be able to help make a positive impact.
I applied to the healthcare analytics internship along with a lot of other students and applicants from other colleges in Utah. After going through the interview process (including my first group interview) I somehow managed to get one of the open positions. I was stoked! My wife and I moved down to Utah for my internship and it was at this same time I applied to the University of Utah for their Biomedical Informatics Master’s program. My wife was pregnant at the time while doing her own internship in video production.
I got into the Biomedical Informatics program at the University of Utah shortly after we had moved. Since I was passionate about healthcare and data science, it seemed like a great fit. I chose the Data Science emphasis and started Fall 2019.
That internship is what taught me the SQL programming language, before that, I had not really used SQL at all besides taking one or two classes. Experience can be the best teacher and just being in the right job will help you grow more quickly than personal study probably ever will. If you have a job at least related to your field, that’s 8 more hours a day you have practicing compared to those who are trying to learn it on their own. I’ve learned you just need to know enough to get your foot in the door and then you have got to make the jump. There’s so much training to be had once you get accepted into the position.
I was able to pivot from Accounting into that internship not because I was an expert by any means, but because I knew enough and was passionate about healthcare.
My Career Journey — Switching from Data Analyst to Data Scientist
I worked at the internship in the summer of 2019 and then had to apply for a position within the company. My wife and I were expecting our first baby at that time too, so I was really hopeful I could leverage the experience gained from my internship to get a full-time data analytics position.
In order to get the position, I had to take a technical SQL test. Thank goodness I had the internship since I don’t think I would have been able to pass the test otherwise. I was fortunate enough to become an analyst in the population health department and later on in a subsidiary of Intermountain that was newly created called Castell. It was a company focused on value-based healthcare, which is the field within healthcare that I was most passionate about and was my dream industry.
Our son was born that October, which was right after my Master’s program started. That semester I took 11 credits, which was quite a bit of work to do in addition to a full-time job plus being a sleep-deprived parent taking care of a newborn. I would recommend maybe doing two of those, but all three made it so I don’t think there were many other times I have ever been busier.
I was part of the Intermountain population health department through the end of 2019. After that, myself and a lot of my coworkers switched to start working at Castell since the population health department was being closed and Castell was taking its place. After working at Castell as a data analyst for a year, a data science position opened up within the company. I applied to the position and made it to the final 3 applicants, but got beat out in the final round. I waited another year and another data science position opened. I felt more confident this time, but got beat out again and actually didn’t make it to the personal project round this time.
I was still determined to become a data scientist in healthcare and so I applied to data science positions outside of the company. I had recently finished my Master’s in 2021 and was excited to see how I compared to other data scientists in the marketplace. There were so many other data science applicants during this time. A job position might have just been posted no longer than a day, but if it had data scientist in the title, they might already have close to 100 applicants. I also was hoping to get a position before we had our 2nd child, which we were expecting in December 2021.
I applied at other companies not because I didn’t like my current company (as a matter of fact I loved it), but it was mainly because I felt like I couldn’t grow my skillset in the way I wanted at the company unless I switched positions. I also was looking for new people to learn from in my career and wanted to grow.
After looking for 2 weeks, I was fortunate enough to get an offer at my current company, Validate Health. It is also focused on value-based care and I love it. They have a really interesting data stack where I can apply my data science skills and learn from my new coworkers as well.
My data analytics experience definitely helped me get this job as well as my expertise in the healthcare industry. My education was also taken into consideration in my job offer. I had a written take-home challenge as well as a day-in-the-office micro-project. They were thorough in understanding the depth of my skillset, which I appreciated.
My Career Journey - Learning to Code
I am passionate about data science and healthcare and was fortunate enough to get my dream job at 28. I get to be creative in my job and am challenged daily with a variety of projects to work on. It’s great getting excited about what I am going to learn at my job every day. However, regardless of how I feel about data science, someone else may feel the opposite; I can see someone saying my work is tedious and frustrating. The code errors require a certain level of persistence and OCD to get through sometimes.
Through this process, one thing I’ve learned is that you should plan and re-plan your future all the time to get where you want to go. However, I can almost guarantee it will never turn out as you have planned. Your 1 year plan will probably be pretty close to what you envisioned, but I would like to meet someone whose 5 year plan was exactly what they envisioned.
So no, I was not one of those that was coding as soon as I came out of the womb and had 10 years of experience by my 10th birthday. I didn’t even learn programming in high school. I first was introduced to programming in college. For me, coding used to be some esoteric thing where they had the terminal open on their computer and typed in strings of language no one understood. Coding seemed like some unknowable ambiguous thing reserved for those who started young. That is definitely not the case. A lot of code looks like this
if this statement is true:
then do thisor this
select all columns from this table (that is essentially a spreadsheet)Maybe you’re already familiar with coding and are nodding your head in agreement or maybe you’re one of the coding wizards I mentioned and you are looking down on the rest of us from your throne of superior understanding and intellect.
So that’s my career journey so far. If you have follow-up questions, feel free to leave a comment. I would be happy to answer any questions for those of you who are also looking to break into data science or data analytics.
My Interests, Passions, & Hobbies
That was a long explanation of my career, but the main focus of writing on this platform is career-related, so I spent quite a bit of time on that section.
Outside of work, I love spending time with my family of course. We moved back to Washington from Utah after I finished my Master’s and somehow managed to get a house in this crazy housing market. Both of our families live nearby, which has been great. Our two kids are great and our 2 year old is always full of energy.
I haven’t been able to pursue my interests as much due to getting a Master’s, having 2 kids, buying a house, and switching jobs. However, life is starting to calm down a bit and so I am hoping to get back to rock climbing. I love to go rock climbing indoors or outdoors and hope to go climb at Smith canyon in Oregon sometime soon.
I also love running, I recently got into running some races, which have been a blast.
And of course, I code and write articles in my free time. I think coders are one of those few careers where we spend our free time doing the same thing as we do when we work. It’s the pursuit of continuous up-skilling. The field changes so quickly and there’s so much to learn, I feel like I am always taking extra time to learn.
Besides those hobbies, I like to read. I read a lot of non-fiction, but occasionally my wife encourages me to pick up a fiction book that I end up enjoying.
So that’s about all for now! Hopefully, you enjoyed the read and were able to get to know how I got to where I am today after that long post.
Thanks for reading and hope you enjoy the content I create 😄
