Hello everyone, this is my first post on Medium and in this article, I will talk about how I became a Data Scientist just in a month and what I am doing with it right now.
First of all, I must say that my biggest dream was to study and learn Data Science, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence and learn as much as I could in this field. So, how did I achieve this?
If we go to the beginning of this adventure, in November, you will see how unexpectedly everything has developed. At the beginning of this year, I was elected as the president of the IEEE EGE Robotic and Automation community, and I took on different responsibilities. One of them was to organize webinars on special days dedicated to RAS (Robotic and Automation Society) in the annual calendar of the IEEE community. Of course, with the excitement and stress of my first presidency, I asked myself the following question while thinking about how to do my first duty: Who does this community, which includes young people who are interested in learning, like us, need to listen to and benefit from their knowledge the most? Of course, the first name that came to my mind was Senior Data Scientist Zafer Acar, the person whose writings I followed along with my father for a long time. We immediately prepared an email with my friend in the community and sent it to Mr. Acar. He gave us a positive response and we held a webinar on Artificial Intelligence on November 17th. At the end of the webinar, we want to develop ourselves as young engineers in Turkey in the field of AI, but because we could not find enough sources I mentioned. And I asked him if he could teach us. He was so eager to teach, he said that if I set up a team of 15 people, he would be happy to give lectures to us. Of course, this opportunity would not have been missed. I immediately formed a team of 15 people. This team was made up of people who were really eager to learn and who risked long working hours. After that, he shared the syllabus for January with us and we immediately added it to our calendars. While we were looking forward to the coming of that day, Mr. Acar gave us pre-work and we prepared ourselves for training before the lectures officially started.
I’m aware of how it sounds, you might be thinking: Who would train themselves for that training before getting an education? The answer is; we did. Because the training we will receive in 1 month was the kind of training that would make us competitive in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Until January, we completed various prework on Python and statistics. We started training on January 1st at 7:30 in the morning, and we covered the following topics on the weekends, 8 hours a day in a month, respectively:
- Python Basics
- Reading CSV, Excel, JSON, SQL, etc. files with Python
- Data visualization with Matplotlib, Pandas, and Seaborn
- EDA (Exploratory data analysis)
- Data Collection and Understanding
- Web Scraping
- Feature Engineering
- Missing Value Imputation
- Creating Dummies
- Supervised Learning
- Unsupervised Learning
- Regression
- Classification
- Clustering
- Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
- Graph Theory
- Computer Vision
- Deep Learning
- Recommender Systems
- Time Series Analysis
Yes, we learned a lot and we constantly wrote code while learning. During the training, he had various project assignments. If our education was not in the form of project-based learning (PBL), it would not be possible for us to learn so much in such a short time. We took notes for every project we do. Those among us who have completed these projects and whose grade is above 80% have received certificates signed by Senior Data Scientist Zafer Acar.
If you ask me, it was the most difficult but also the most enjoyable training I have ever had in my life. Our teacher is in the United States and we are in Turkey. We had a great time difference between us. While Mr. Acar all his time at night for a month, we got up at 7:00 in the morning before sunrise and felt excited and energetic and started training. And I can say that we were so sorry that it was over, we would continue our education without complaining or getting bored, even for 1 month or more.
So what am I doing now? First of all, I have to say that there is no end to learning, so in order to improve myself, I choose projects that interest me from Kaggle and start working on them and I study the codes of Data Scientists and learn different things. At the same time, I found my first job and started to work as a Data Scientist in North Carolina, USA.
I hope you liked my first post. With this article, I told you about my adventure as a Data Scientist. In my future articles, I plan to tell you the projects that I have solved. So, see you in my next post.