I have been in the industry for about 10 years now I'm gonna do my 10-year video I'm still trying to
figure out what to what to say in it I've worked at two big tech companies but what you actually
don't know is that I don't have a degree in data science I come from a non-tech background I went
to a community college I am first female in my family to graduate from a university program
I'm the first female in my family to actually be working I'm the first people in my family to be
sitting on a camera and talking to you all um anyways there's a lot of first of a first-gen
immigrant there's a lot of firsts and growing up I never even thought that this is the world that
I would be living in oh my god I'm an emotional so going back to very early on I didn't grow up
with a computer in my house like we didn't have a computer cell phones didn't exist back then so
I didn't even know that working on a computer is actually an option as a career so that's
the background that I come with and that's how clueless I was in terms of like the tech world
and what exists what are the fields I have a six year gap between my high school I had to drop out
of high school for personal reasons which I won't go into detail because that will make me even more
emotional so and I also had a another piece of the story that I don't share often is that I actually
had a near-death experience that was for me kind of like the pivotal point of starting all over
again so that's where how the six year Gap ended otherwise I might not be here where I am so I
decided to go back to school and actually applied to universities but nobody would accept me because
I had a blank resume I was a high school dropout and no colleges were willing to take a risk on
a high school dropout with a blank resume black experience I started at a community college and I
studied at Community College I took online classes mostly and I did my two years at Community College
doing online and then some classes were hybrid so when I started to decided to go back to school I
actually picked business as my major because for some reason that was like an obvious choice to
me at that time I still didn't know Tech existed I finished Community College worked really hard
um another piece of information English is not my first language and I struggled quite a bit with
English after finishing the Community College I actually had applied to University of Washington
and um they make you form the business school and they make you take a written assessment test I
fail that test that's how bad my English was and I had to like hire a tutor and like get help and
kind of like work on my English virgin English specifically anyways so I took the I failed the
test the English test and I applied again so I got to the business school and at the business
school I had access to counselors and advisors and that's like a common theme that you're gonna
see in my story is that whenever I had access to an advisor or a counselor I leveraged that that
resource to the fullest so you will see that in my story as I move forward so one of the counselors
actually told me the student advisor is to like take different courses in the business school
because within the business school you have to pick like a kind of like a focus idea uh
like marketing Finance accounting and things like that so he suggested that I should take different
courses in my business school so I can see what I actually like so I pick a major so I started
taking the courses it takes a while because I was taking one course each a quarter eventually I took
one course which was in Information Systems so information systems was basically was kind of like
more focused on like SQL database management data manipulation and that was my first exposure to the
data world and after taking that class it was one quarter I I knew what I wanted to do up until then
I thought I was going to do accounting because I would always get 4.0 in accounting but it was
until that class that I took that idealized like data data world is what I want to explore further
however it was actually too late for me to switch out of the business major because as I said like
I took my first two years in community college in my third year I was taking classes after failing
once like getting rejected from the business school once I made it and I was like already
at the end of my third year so I had like barely one year left so it was too late for me to like
switch out of the business major and go explore another option that is more technical or more
data science focus and back then like this was back in 2012 back then data science wasn't that
big of a thing so what I ended up doing I ended up taking a lot of classes outside of business school
in the information school they had uh they had the three classes that they offered that nicely
packaged into a certificate I ended up taking that at some point during that time period I got an
internship I struggled a lot with the internship like interviews was also another struggle for
me because there was one time I went into an interview and this guy was like okay and I was
so stupid I told them that I have kids and this guy was uh in the interview he was he was saying
okay so like if you have kids how are you gonna manage the word and I didn't know like that was
such an inappropriate question back then because I was so new to the interview world but now I look
back and I realized like wow that was ridiculous that was a ridiculous question that they shouldn't
have asked me that's literally discrimination so now I make sure to not mention my personal life
stuff in my interviews unless I feel comfortable with the with the company and with the person that
I'm talking to so I struggled with the interviews quite a bit and that's again when I leveraged my
career counselors a lot actually after I failed so many interviews I went to them and they started
helping me with like mock interviews asking me questions so I did a quite a few of them and
that's when I actually got better because they would give me feedback and I'm actually really
good if somebody gives me feedback like I'm really good at adapting the feedback and I think that's
another part of my story that kind of helped me like the adaptability and willingness to learn and
willingness to grow anyways eventually I applied to an internship at Amazon and I ended up getting
that internship The Internship was more focused on financial analysis and I realized like that's the
type of work I don't want to do and that's when when I was interning at Amazon I actually got
exposed to the data generating domain bie world so I knew I was like this this sounds interesting
the data engineering specifically I really okay I'll be honest here I really love that that data
engineer in our team would leave office by 3 pm and 4pm and then we'll go home and work in his own
time and I was like what is this job family that I have to stay here until six but he can leave at
three and four like I want to do that so that was like partially partially my inspiration like I'm
just being honest here but also like that it's also related to my interest in the data domain
so I started like building my resume I did an internship at Amazon which was paid but before
Amazon actually did do another internship it was a startup that doesn't exist anymore The Internship
was basically it didn't pay me anything but like I was helping them Implement Google analytics into
their website and helping them understand what's happening on their web and all of that anyways so
the reason I'm mentioning this is because like that's how I basically got my resume from blank
to having a lot of projects the other thing I did at school is I got involved with a student Club
um that would consult adult smaller startups in my local area so that again like didn't pay
me but I was able to like get real world exposure because we were working with startups and we were
helping them like build their databases analyze their data and things like that that helped me
build like project portfolio that I can show on my resume and would help me like get a recruiters and
hiring managers and also gives me something to talk about in my interview so building Network
as Amazon really helped me because it helped me land a few data engineering interviews because
my own team where I was interning as a financial analyst intern was not willing to take me back as
a data engineer they were only willing to give me an offer as a financial analyst so that's
where the networking helped quite a bit because I interviewed for data engineering roles from the
certificate that I had taken at University of Washington prepared me for the technical round
and I did study on my own like through online resources and all of that eventually I passed
the interview for a data engineering role and I got an offer from another team that's when my team
found out and they were because I told them like I'm gonna take that offer I don't want to come
back as a financial analyst I want to pursue a more technical role and I want to go into Data
engineering so that's when my team where I in turn decided to change their mind and they basically
accepted me back as a data engineer because I had another offer from a different team at
Amazon for data engineer role and I ended up taking my team's offer because I was already
familiar with the space I interned at eight months which was like crazy long internship they don't do
those anymore but like they were still trying to figure out how to do internships back then so I
had a lot of experience working with the data in that team specifically so I thought it would be
give me a boost leg up in terms of like a ramp up time that I would have there so I joined full-time
as a data engineer after graduating college my senior teammate was super helpful he was like
one of the best senior teammates that you could ask for he really really guided me mentored me he
was available as a resource whenever I needed to learn something of course like I would learn on
my own but then if I have like more questions or if I didn't understand a concept accurately like
I'll go to that my senior teammate and I would talk to I would talk to him and ask him question
and if he wasn't there like I don't know if I would ever survive as a data engineer because
there was a lot I had to learn I went to business school like I didn't learn that in school so I had
to learn on the job oh my God life is too short my senior teammate that person I'm talking about
he actually had to take an early retirement because he got diagnosed with some medical
condition that doesn't let him that he can't work life is too short work is not everything work is
not everything like in the health is like the most important thing so I did data engineering
for about two years and got promoted to the data engineer too and at that point I started feeling
pretty comfortable in the data engineering domain there were some pieces that I really liked about
data engineering and some pieces I didn't you can watch one of my videos where I talked about both
of these angles and why I ended up leaving if you want to get a more detailed perspective but
eventually I did a research for this project which was more data science focused on the
side outside of my data engineering World in at work and that was my exposure to like the data
science world and that's when I realized like I wanted to transition to the data scientist role
so then again I started networking within with the people in the companies looking for different
roles different opportunities as you can see that building projects and networking and highlighting
my work whether that is through paid or unpaid internships or in pro bono work it has been the
key to my progression in my journey back then I limited my project highlights to my resume this
was 10 years ago like more than 10 years ago if I were to do it again I would definitely create a
website to Showcase my portfolio which is perfect because our sponsor for this section of the video
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this portion of the video now back to my journey from data engineering to data science so as I
started networking and looking for different teams I found a team that was perfect I joined
a team which was more data science focused but they needed a data engineer to do some work for
them so I thought this would be a perfect opportunity that I could join the team as
a data engineer get exposed to the space and then I did have a conversation with the hiring manager
that eventually they will help me transition into the data science domain I actually started
learning from other people's work I would read their code repository I would go through each
of their projects read their paper and then read the back end of the code so a lot of my learning
came from like getting exposure to like how other people work how people who are currently working
in the domain how they work and how they think there were times when I would go line by line
like I did know R back then and the team was heavily using R during that time so I actually
had to learn art which was actually a very steep curve for me because R has a very steep learning
curve and it's not as intuitive as you would think for statistics my manager recommended me
a few books that I ended up reading uh he was a great resource for me and eventually I ended up
doing my own projects in the data science domain after a year it built a case that my manager
took my project portfolio and went to the HR to help me transition into the data scientists role
officially I was still under data engineer title at that point so this has been the HR argued that
like I don't qualify as a data scientist because I don't have a masters or I don't have a PhD in
the data science domain and this is again where my manager was super crucial in my journey because he
basically told the HR like that she doesn't have the degree credentials but if she's actually doing
the work like why do you care about the degree so much and that's when the HR decided that yes
if she can do the work then we're gonna which her family so it worked didn't change because I was
already doing the work but my title in the system officially changed to data scientists here I got
to work on like super cool projects I ended up staying in that team for about three more
years team itself was super cool uh because we were exposed to the entire Amazon World globally
um and I got to work with a lot of different businesses from like checkout team to Prime team
Alexa team like any team within Amazon you name it like I have worked with them which is like one
of the best ways for me to kind of like have that opportunity to get exposure to different products
different business area while applying the data science and I to this date I actually missed
working in that team I would have never left I would have never left if my team didn't go through
at New York we all went through a New York and my manager ended up leaving and I didn't really like
um I mean he's okay it was he wasn't the same manager but uh topic for another video but uh
that's when I um I decided to uh pursue other options I started interviewing at different
teams within Amazon again I had few offers but an opportunity at Google came along so that's
when I decided to interview here and it took me three tries okay one thing about me is like
I am very honest and I'm open so I'm telling you this because don't think like I did all that data
science work and I went to Google and like Google is like yes come come to us no I interviewed once
I got rejected I interviewed twice I got rejected this was my third time interviewing and this
time I actually made it when I worked as a data scientist I knew like this was the right career
choice for me because my feedback my performance review went up I was actually enjoying the work I
was delivering great work and that was actually the first time I received top tier rating at a
company at my last company at Amazon which is top tier rating is actually only given to like top I
don't know one or five percent of people it's very there to get that rating and I actually got that
rating during my time as a data scientist to me that was a clear sign like this is a great fit for
me and not only that at my current company where I am at I actually have received their their version
of the top tier rating which feels again like it feels so unreal because like if you watch my video
from start to now like to where I was to at a community college with no Tech background with no
data science knowledge to being the having trouble with English being an immigrant having career Gap
High School Dropout and all of that to be here and be validated through my work it just feels amazing
so you must be wondering like how did I waste my time going to business school going to the
engineering route before discovering data science yes if I were to do all over again what I do now
if I were to go all over again I will definitely pick a focus in school that is more data science
and computer science Focus but that doesn't mean that the time that I spent doing business
doing data engineering was wasted because having a data engineering and a business background has
actually made me a better data scientist having a data engineering background made
me more independent where I can actually build my own pipelines it has made me more efficient where
I don't have to rely on other people and I can be more independent in my project having a business
background is actually has been amazing because it has made me a better Communicator a lot of my work
in the data science domain is working with the business stakeholders so me having that background
actually understand business much better what makes sense from business perspective and how
to work with business people like that is one of my strengths actually and data engineering is also
one of my strengths in my work as a data scientist in the data science domain so a couple of
takeaways from my story you're probably not going to succeed the first time but that doesn't mean
you give up you try again second is building my project portfolio and getting hands-on experience
was extremely extremely helpful for me as well as for other people for me it was helpful because it
exposed me to the data science world and it made me realize actually enjoy doing this for other
people it's because it's going on my resume and other people can see that I can actually do the
work third is the networking networking has been really really awesome Avenue for me to kind of
ask for help get help where I need it that's all I wanted to say I hope you found something valuable
in this video thank you so much for watching I hope you're having a beautiful day I will talk
to you in another video talk to you later bye look at this this has been you know this is actually a
big deal to me because growing up I was very shy I didn't have a voice I didn't have an opinion so
this is like a complete 180 for me to like sit in front of a camera and actually be recognized for
it like it's it's just crazy how the environment can change a person have a placeholder for it
oh that took a lot of work