I’m a Data Scientist | Here is My Story
I’ve always admired women who work in STEM. Both my mother and grandmother are engineers and I’ve always been inspired by them. When I was in high school, I was sure I would major in literature or English. It was when I entered my 12th-grade physics fair that I had the opportunity to experiment with coding. This led me to build a moving robotics arm made from shower curtain rods I controlled through code. I took home first place and this experience sparked my interest to pursue STEM.
My university years weren’t always easy. During the five years at my university (The German University in Cairo), I spent the first 2 years feeling inadequate. I was intimidated by how smart the other students were. Thankfully, by 3rd year, my confidence grew and I started to find my rhythm. If you’re reading this and you’re finding university challenging, just know it will get better.
I found out about Manara by chance on LinkedIn. I was working when I applied and I was hopeful that Manara would lead to career development and potentially new opportunities. I was accepted and joined their female-only cohort where I made many good friends and found the community that I had been looking for.
When you begin the program you’ll have several mentors to help guide you. Mine were Amal from Meta and Philippe from Google. Amal helped develop my soft skills — we would work through my insecurities and she’d give me advice on how to answer certain questions with confidence. As Amal is also an Arab female in tech, she was able to provide guidance that made sense to me — I could easily relate to her. It’s so nice to be able to speak to someone who understands your professional situation. Philippe was my technical mentor and reviewed my work within machine learning. He provided useful insights on a mock project I created and provided fantastic career advice. We still have bi-weekly meetings even though I graduated.
This is what I love about Manara. The community will follow you through your entire journey, they won’t give up on you.
Manara’s program is specifically designed for software development, not machine learning, however, Manara’s founders made adjustments to my program. I was able to excel at the machine learning and AI coursework, and they saw potential in being able to place me in a great role after graduating. I am grateful for how flexible and supportive they were.
When I was close to graduating, I told Manara’s placement team that I wanted to stay in Cairo to work, and they set up referrals with companies that offer a fully-remote working environment. I’m pleased to share that I was recently hired as a Data Scientist at RelationalAI, a company that develops a cloud-based platform for reasoning, prediction, and optimization.
