Wow. What a journey.
In 2017 I was a high school teacher and chess coach who liked to solve problems on Brilliant.org (highly recommended site, by the way!) for fun. The crazy thing was, nobody had ever told me what coding was about or what a software engineer actually did. Solving graph theory problems had to be easier with the help of computer, I thought. Likewise, so did many other problems I encountered. It wasn’t until the end of 2020 that I first began coding! From my first ‘hello world!’ in Python to completing a seven month intensive data science and business analytics certificate program, I was enjoying everything that had to do with coding and made the decision to switch careers!
Fast forward, to September of 2021 and I was enrolled in the postbacc program here at OSU, eager to turn myself into a verified programming wiz.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. CS271 and CS344 were, personally, much more challenging than I anticipated. Luckily, I made some good contacts and found support. Finally, I have made it all the way to this capstone course.
Having already begun my coding journey with data science using packages in the Anaconda Python suite (Pandas, Numpy, Keras, Scikit-learn, etc.), I filled out the survey opting to participate in one of the projects that involves machine learning or neural networks. My past projects were based on data from companies who were typically interested in determining what product to sell to whom. Some of the projects I saw on the list for this class were more unique, however, such as making software that effectively buys bitcoin. This is in the same ball park yet a step further from what I have done so far.
I am very much looking forward to getting finding out who I will be working with and on what!!!
(UPDATE to the initial post: Luckily I have been assigned to the Bitcoin project I mentioned. One of my goals is to learn more about machine learning in general. Another goal is to simply make the most out of working with a team on this project. In the past all of my machine learning experience has been individual work with intermittent mentor revision. Special thanks is due to for the professor for taking my preference into account.)
(PS, to all my fellow last term cohort members: YOU’VE GOT THIS!!!!!)
Leave a Reply