I'm now a data scientist!

TLDR; I went to a recruitment hackathon 6 months ago and got offered a job. Now part of one of the coolest data science teams around

As the title explains, I started a new job two months ago as a junior data scientist!

I spoke to a friend of mine when I got the job and he said I should write a blog post on it, so here it is.

I started looking for a new job earlier this year and I must have interviewed multiple times this year…I got rejected from them all. After being really good at my current job for so long, the rejections definitely made me feel like an impostor. With hindsight, I realised the roles weren’t right as they were either too technical or not going to further my career.

I then just gave up on looking for a job…

Recruitment Charity Hackathon

One evening I was browsing Linkedin and saw a charity hackathon being advertised. I signed up and then got the confirmation email. What I didn’t realise was that it was a recruitment hackathon. Having had all those rejections before I thought ‘Let’s just go for it, you probably won’t get it again.’

I showed up to the hackathon 6 months ago with 21 other applicants. The task given was to help a charity for missing people with their questionnaire data to predict which people were at higher risk to go missing.

We were split into seven teams, working with 2 data scientists currently employed with the company; they assisted with computer difficulties and observed our behaviour. I was working alongside some awesome people and learnt a lot of data science that day. If I didn’t get a callback, at least it was useful!

I was called back for a formal interview. My wife was super supportive and came with me to the interview beforehand for moral support, which was awesome. The interview went well and the role was everything I wanted. However I’ve had interviews go well before and not receive an offer so I decided not to get my hopes up. My wife on the other hand, announced she had a “good feeling” and decided I had already got the job. Turns out she was right- at 9.06pm on the same day I got:

Being a data scientist

I’ve been working as a data scientist for over two months and I’m enjoying it a lot. I’ve learnt so much recently and plan to share that on here.

I thought about changing the title of my site but decided against it. The field of data science is always growing and I’ll need to keep learning, so the title will act as a reminder for me.

So I’m going to continue to update this site but I’m also going to include short code snippets that will be useful to others and not just full blown posts.

It’s been a long journey and it’s still going but here are things to take away:

• Rejections will happen, the thing is to learn from them
• Apply for roles that are right for you and not what the recruiter pushes you into
• Impostor syndrome is a thing, but don’t let the fear stop you from trying.
• Always keep learning
• Trust the wife’s instincts for she is never wrong (yes she wrote this part)

Thanks again for reading, till the next post!