Thursday, June 6, 2013

Why I Wanted to Code Early in My Career

Like most undergraduates I had little idea about I wanted to do with my career.  I enjoyed science, so I studied the pre-med curriculum. After graduation I decided to work with a patient population to evaluate if it was something I would really enjoy.  I was too impatient, and wanted to spend my time solving new problems.  I landed in business school, and during my first year I had the good fortune of working with a professor that was building a data science driven web application.  Through the work I was exposed to other graduate students that were using machine learning to develop projects like a hedge fund strategy using stock tweets data. 

            The analytic way of problem solving I was introduced to as a research assistant complimented what I was learning in business school.  When learning strategy, I understood how effective data analytics could help a company develop a competitive strategy.  When learning finance, it was easy for me to understand how a technological shift and corresponding high growth market could drive a company like IBM to make a large number of text-analytics acquisitions.  Learning about economics helped me understand how a labor shortage in data scientists could influence wages.


            When it came to thinking about what I would like to do after graduation, I decided that the best thing I could do for my career was work as a data scientist.  Working as a graduate assistant had taught me that the most effective people had both a deep understanding of business problems, as well as the technologies that could be used to solve the problem.  After graduation I wanted to ramp up my programming skills and network in the San Francisco area, so I enrolled in the Hack Reactor program.  

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