[Day 0] My journey in 2017 has begun now
The story of my life
I am just a 23 years old guy who has already graduated from an economics university, but had strong interest in science and technology.
After a pretty successful studying time during few years of high school, I decided to attend to Foreign Trade University. A weird decision at that time because I have no interest in economics at all. Although falling in love with physics and mathematics, I decided spent my next 4 years on studying economics.
After 3 years of disaster (when I was last year student), I changed my career path into start-up and technology field. I thought it would be great to work in the field related to what I love the most. But what exactly stuff I want to work on? Technology, science, start-up are too wide topics, I need to pick a specific branch.
Facing some obstacles
I spent my last 2 years to figure out the best fit stuff I wanna get involve. I started launching some start-ups on my own, do all the business stuff such as marketing, sales, hr. After a lot of failure, I figured out the problems of myself. I have not had enough passion on my products yet. Without technology knowledge and skills, I can not build proper prototype, or make any other tech guys work with me.
I feel so lost, depressed because I do not know what kind of person I should become. A business man who has no idea about technology and want to build business about technology product; a hard-working office man who work in import-export field and play science, technology as a hobby; or a non-tech-background programmer who self-studying everything and try to make products on his own.
Luckily, one of my friends has already launched a start-up company and he willing to let me in to work as a web developer, gave me a valuable chance to both studying programming and earned some money to afford the living cost. I studied a lots about front-end and back-end development, built some products as the pages www.studyinspain.vn or www.studentlifecare.com. But after one year, the project I have involved has come to end, so I leaf the company looking for the new journey.
For the first 2 months of 2017, I started applied to few company in the Front-end developer, data analyst, or even marketing positions (I had some experiences in marketing before), but I failed them all. Well, that hurted me really bad! This completely failure gave me some time to rethink again all of the stuff I have done so far. What’s wrong with me and what I should do to my life right now.
Rethinking everything
What I have now: a litter experience in web development; basic knowledge in business, Python, and ambition of building cool, useful products
What I love: tech, physics, maths, start-up
What I want to do: create cool and innovative stuff, deep understand about what behind the technology, build business based on that products, build a network of same-ambition and skilled guys who can work with me.
Well, I want to put the job of develop web and app for other guys in my team, I will focus on the other factors of my products about AI, machine learning. Well, the problem is that if I am ready to learn something about these things, it gonna take a lot of time and effort, not to mention I will give up on other stuff to concentrate on data science and machine learning.
So I checked if I suit this field:
- I have the statistical-and-probability-oriented thinking (I don’t know if this term even exists), always questioning something like how much chance I have on successful flirting that girl, what is the hour with highest percentage of people on line on facebook, and so on. Most of them are stupid questions, but when I watch people, and other things around I always try to collect information to come up with some useful conclusion, or something in common.
- Really interested in AI and machine learning stuff, as some robots from Google or some image recognized applications. Most of my start-up ideas come from these applications, I can not build my own products just by using some build-in library, I need to know what laying deep inside those things to make it on my own.
- Not just applied to machine learning and other advanced stuff, data science can be applied to some business aspects like market research or management. Those things are quite useful to me as well when I launch my project later.
- I have quite good preparation in this field already, although the level of each skill of mine is not really high, I believe that I am ready for this challenge.
How my plan is going on
The plan lasts for 10 months, from March 2017 to December 2017.
My purpose at the end of the year:
Have a thoughtful understanding about the main concepts in data science and machine learning. Achieve few prizes in data science or ML competitions. Be able to write a complete academic research paper in this field (not an advanced lever). Build a complete product using ML with my team. Build a network with around 20 other data scientists in my country.
Okay let’s see my preparation:
- A job and money — checked: I just joint a start-up which worked in this field. Although the salary is not too good, it seems like enough for me to survive over this year. I am planning for working part-time in the night shift as well, because the need of saving and spending money on necessary stuff.
- Knowledge — checked: Python, probability and statistics, already studied those things for a while.
- A place to work — checked: even if I can not come to the office yet, coffee shop, and co-working space is a good choice. Unfortunately, I can not work at home, I feel extremely lazy and unmotivated when working at home.
- A group — checked: team up with 2 more guys who have the same interest, passion and purpose. It is great to learn in a group. Joined other groups for learning as well.
- Mentors — checked: from the experience from the past, I need mentors for checking my progress and advices. Thanks for some awesome and generous guys, now I have some great mentors.
- Resources — checked: on line resources enough for studying in the next 100 years.
The only thing which concerns me is my determination, is it possible to reach the purpose in only 10 months, can I remain working effectively for 10 months.
Well, can not just doubt yourself and stay still forever, I have to move on no matter what. Another thing have to keep in mind is that don’t let other’s successes haunt myself, just focus on my work. I will keep posting new articles when studying new stuff with my team.
