📅 Professional Timeline
🤔 Problem Space
When I was browsing the web relatively recently, I found Shantini Vyas's website, which talks about how she ended up in her current career working for Apple.
Many of my students and mentees at the University of Washington ask what it's like to transition from an explicitly non-tech career to being a programmer or data scientist full time, so I figured I would put something similar together.
🛠Process
2007-2011
Studied at The Ohio State University; lived as a freegan for most of this time, and sold thrifted things online. Studied computer music under Mark Ainger, which was maybe my first exposure to serious programming in Max/MSP/Jitter.
2012
Worked as librarian/professional tutor; volunteered for ESL teaching; started exploring generative code and design using Processing
2013
Taught English in China; began self-study in data science and programming
2014
Returned from China; worked as professional tutor; continued self-study in data science and programming
2015-2017
Worked at UNC in the business school producing coursework; did some simple web programming & maintenance/data analysis as part of job
June 2017
Quit job; moved to Seattle
September 2017
Enrolled in graduate school; Masters of Science in Information Management. Won a graduate fellowship to work in the Foreign Service through the Foreign Affairs Information Technology program but declined it to try my hand at the tech industry and stay in one place for a while
Summer 2018
Open Data Literacy Internship with City of Seattle and State of Washington, where I generated embeddings and modeled topics in public records
Autumn 2018 - Spring 2019
Data Modeling & User Research for IAC Data Model Project; I probably talk about this project the most in interviews
Spring 2019
Graduated from MSIM; applied to (likely) thousands of jobs on the internet, trying to decide between a career in quantitative user experience research and data science straight-up; got offered some insultingly low salaries as a data analyst as part of this journey (<$30k in downtown Seattle)
September 2019 - October 2022
Data Engineer at Four Peaks Environmental Science and Data Solutions, where I did all kinds of stuff and learned rapidly about technical work but also having a customer-focused mindset
October 2022 - Present
Data Engineer at Bold Penguin, where I maintained data pipelines for systems that process PDFs with computer vision, ingest data into a database, etc.
🎉 Outcomes
I still run into questions I'm not sure how to answer professionally, and put in lots of effort to self-study and learn new things.