Hi, my name is Chris and this is my captsone blog! We haven’t been assigned our projects yet so I figure the best way to start off would be to talk a bit about how I got into programming.
My journey into programming started with math and statistics. I did my undergraduate and graduate degrees in math, with a heavy focus on stats. It was such a heavy stats focus, that the first language I wrote a substantial amount of code in was R. Even though the indexing starts at 1, I’ll always have a soft spot for this language. It allowed me to learn the basics while still being able to focus on creating cool statistical models and run lots of tests. I used it for class projects, some personal machine learning projects, and even wrote some R for a coding test that landed me a job offer. It had its perks but I could tell I needed to branch out. Along the way through school I also picked up a bit of Matlab and some C++ (finally some normal indexing!).
After graduating, my experience with stats and math lead me to an interest in data science. It turns out that R is popular in academic circles for doing stats but when working in industry the majority of machine learning work is done in Python. So I enrolled in some intro Python classes in Coursera and sprinkled in a bit of SQL for good measure. These programming courses were all data science focused so it was a lot of work done with the Numpy, Pandas, and Sklearn packages. These are the basic tools that any good data scientist needs, so when I finished I started applying for jobs.
It turns out that my first job would not be data science focused at all. I accepted an offer for a security engineer position at a hospital, managing the security of the hospital’s network. I picked up some sysadmin skills and also got a lot of experience working in Powershell, which helped scratch my coding itch. This wasn’t the career I wanted to be in for the long haul so I went back to grad school for stats. While there I honed my Python and R skills even further, so when I graduated I was ready to go for data science.
I got an entry level data science position pretty quickly, and my programming skills have been ramping up ever since then. On the job I’ve learned Julia as well as some Javascript. From there I bit the bullet and decided that it would be best to round out my coding skillset, so I enrolled in OSU. I’ve learned a lot of things at OSU that I never would’ve picked up on my own, so I’m really thankful for getting into this program. Programming is a skill where you never stop learning, and I’m looking forward to the journey ahead.
I hope my story so far was interesting!
Chris
