From a young age I have always been interested in computing in one way or another, from creating a website about cheese to building my first PC, I've always had some interest in the field. However, I never delved deep into coding and my maths past does not go past A-Level maths. So why did I get into data science?
The simple answer to that is curiosity. I was always one to ask questions and as someone who was often browsing online, one thing peaked my attention. Adverts, moreover, how these adverts I was seeing on sites such as Facebook and YouTube were so tailored to me. I took to researching this question and came back from this voyage with a basic understanding of big data and how my data is being used to find better products and advertise products that I cared about. From this, I decided to take upon creating a report of how data and statistical analytics have changed advertising recently with a project entitled 'How has statistical analytics changed the face of advertising over the 21st century. Through this, I saw the backbones of how data is being used to better advertising but to also better the products that people buy.
One major discovery was about deep learning and machine learning and how it seems to be the future of data science. After this project I took a step back from data science, I felt I had understood all of the questions that I wanted to answer for now and took some time to focus on my studies. However, there was still a flame in me that hadn't been extinguished and I decided to take the summer to finally learn some code. Something I'd been meaning to do for years. So I decided along with my part-time job to teach myself python as I'd been told it was one of the most used languages in data science. At the end of the summer I came out understanding the functionality of python, maybe not everything I wanted to know but I could happily write a simple function or a simple calculator using loops and such.
At this point I was applying to universities, I was told by many people to do an applied degree and follow my skill of chemistry and do a degree in that. So that's what I began to do. It was always in the back of my mind that I could take a masters in Data science but I didn't think I'd have the mathematics or programming skills to do that after university. However, I could not hold this curiosity. After being on the rope for months I finally decided to change my decision and go for it. I changed my whole game plan to accommodate for Data science.
Currently, I am in my second year of study at the University of Sussex studying computer science with Artificial intelligence. This course interested me because it was not only going to give me the fundamental coding skills I needed to succeed in this field but also allowed me to go out of my comfort zone and do neuroscience modules which gave me a theoretical understanding to what it is that I am building.
Thank you very much for reading this far, I hope you enjoy the rest of my Data Science Journey.