In this first post I am very shortly reflecting on the professional and personal journey that is already behind me, as well as the forthcoming journey that lies ahead of me.
So who am I and why am I now writing these articles?
I’m a German guy who was born and raised near a small village about 60min from Cologne, Germany. After finishing my graduation from German high-school in Krefeld in 2011, with 19 years of age, I wasn’t really sure what to do next. Should I go for an internship, should I apply for a scholarship for University, should I even go to University and what the hell should I be studying. These were some of the questions that I have been asking myself during that time. Luckily during that time, a very good friend of mine, was feeling the same as I did so we developed on this crazy idea to go to Australia for one year where we would have enough time to figure some things out. Back then, none of our friends or relatives have ever heard of somebody who has done something like this before, but for us, this sounded like the perfect solution to our more or less miserable situation (By the way, highly recommended to anybody who feels the same).
One year and some of the most amazing experiences later, I decided to go back to Germany again and go for an undergraduate degree (bachelor’s degree) in International Business and Social Sciences in Kamp-Lintfort, Germany. By that time however, it still did not feel like the perfect solution to me, but since I had some business courses in my high-school already I figured it would be at least not the worst idea to go for a business degree. Almost 6 years later, in 2018 I even graduated with a postgraduate degree (master’s degree) in Economics and Finance in Kleve, Germany. During that time I was for the most part working as a Student Assistant/Consultant at the Corporate Finance and Advisory Services division of Warth & Klein Grant Thornton in Düsseldorf, Germany, where I also ended up working full-time after I was done with my Masters for about 13 months.
While I was writing my master’s thesis (about Data Analytics in the Financial Due Diligence Process), I began to realize that my interest is much more on the analytical side, in the sense that I really liked to crunch numbers, develop specific ideas about how I could improve the efficiency of my work, how to display data in a meaningful way, or just simply how to extract valuable information from some of the underlying datasets. I started reading books and papers about Data Science, listened to several online podcasts and watched multiple videos about this topic because I was thrilled about the many fields where Data Science is actually used. However, there was one problem. Most of the work that I was doing was being done in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Powerpoint. Although being very proficient in both of these programs, I soon realized that if I wanted to get more into Data Science, I actually needed to learn how to work with larger datasets and more importantly I needed to learn how to code.
What next?
Well, I’ve been asking myself this question for a very long time. While the most rational solution to many people would have been to start learning how to code and do some self-study on data science, or even get some sort of certificate in their free time, I figured out that this simply would not cut it for me. I simply did the math of how long it would take me to master something if I would do it part time for several hours a day instead of fully committing to it every day. Obviously, if you want to master something, several months of full time hustle and work will not cut it. However, by realizing that if I would commit to this every day for 8 hours instead of 2 hours, I would be able to achieve almost the same proficiency in 3 months compared to what I would be able to achieve after doing this for 12 months part-time. While I would not recommend this to anyone in a similar situation, because this is a very radical decision, which meant in the worst case that I wasn’t earning any money for a longer period of time, this was just the right decision for me. Especially, because I knew that apart from working with BI tools such as Alteryx Designer, Qlik Sense and Tableau for about 1 1/2 years, I neither had any reasonable degree in computer science, informatics or anything related to it, nor did I have any experience with Python, R, SQL or any other major programming language.
So why should you be following along?
First of all, you don’t need to at all, time is precious 🙂
However, in the following posts, I will share some of my experiences and knowledge along the way of transitioning from the world of business and finance to the world of Data Science. Maybe you are in a somewhat similar situation and are uncertain about what to do next or how to approach a situation like this. This does not only apply if you want to move to Data Science, because most of the principles can be applied to many other areas.
On the other hand, I see three major reasons for documenting my journey and especially my code and projects:
- Documenting my workflows/code/projects/journey does help me learn and memorize the underlying theories much faster
- Since I don’t really have major professional experience with python programming nor do I have a degree in Computer Science, documenting helps me to actually prove to any potential employer that I am actually capable of performing specific tasks using certain algorithms, databases etc.
- You might also be able to draw some inspiration or some new knowledge from some of the stuff that I am doing or writing