How I Shifted From Hospitality To Data Science and Why I Decided to Learn It

“Hello, World!”

My name is Andrea. She. Her. Passionate mind. Stubborn soul. Bohemian heart. Born and raised Peruvian. Proud New Yorker. Self made bilingual. Made citizen of the world by experience.

Welcome to my little space in the great Internet. Thank you for being here!

I hope you enjoy and appreciate, but above all learn some new things along the lines I will be posting here. This is officially my first Blog Publication as a Data Science student. Yay!

My Background

I went to High School and attended Business School in Lima, Peru but dropped out by the fourth semester. I did not have the best experience through school since I always felt like I didn’t fit in.

I was terrible at keeping notebooks and doing homework, but I was really good at asking questions, especially Why? And oh! some of my teachers did not like that very much.

A few others would try to convince me that if I would really apply myself into studying, I could easily become the best student. Cool but first tell me, why?, I thought. I couldn’t find enough purpose in doing that.

Please, don’t take me wrong, I did learn many valuable things by attending school, just not the way they wanted me to learn them, so I failed evaluations and assessments often.

Unfortunately for me, and many other people that could relate to these feelings and situations, traditional school does not leave much room for outside of the box thinking. At least not the school I attended. If your school did allow space for this, appreciate how lucky you have been.

It wasn’t only until recently that I understood and accepted that it is okay to be different and to allow ourselves to DO THINGS differently. It could also be beneficial and very profitable in today’s world.

When I think back to the time when I was about to finish high school and had to decide what was going to be my career (2008), I remember considering “Telecommunications Engineering” as one of my options but! it seemed like a very wild, unknown and expensive choice for a 16 year old girl in a small village in Peru.

So I went with the safest possible one: BUSINESS. One of the many things I learned through business school is that with every CRISIS comes OPPORTUNITY. And that is the exact point I was in my life when I made the decision to start this journey into Data Science.

Since age 16 (I am 28 as I write this blog), I’ve worked in the Hospitality Industry and/or any customer service related job, from housekeeper to tour guide to front desk agent and everything in between. These experiences, dealing with all kinds of people with different backgrounds have led me to keep an open mind and always exercise critical thinking and compassion.

I’ve enjoyed working in Hospitality very much, mainly because it allows me to help others and connect with them, which I love, while making a living out of it. I could say I was living the American Dream, and then the COVID-19 pandemic happened.

Crisis and Opportunity

• As millions of other people, I lost my job due to the pandemic but I got a very valuable resource in exchange: time. And I have decided to invest it all in myself, learn new skills and develop my own capacities so I can help other people do the same.
• With the Internet, things have been changing for a while now and with the quarantine and social distance rules currently in place the change has accelerated greatly. The year 2020 undeniably sets a marked before and after point in time.

These are major game changers and I want to take this crisis as my opportunity to create a better life for myself and everyone around me. So I began my search by opening Google and looking through job postings and school programs available around me.

“Data Science”, “Bootcamp” and “ISA” were everywhere in the results listing… so I went in deeper searching for those keywords and that’s when I found Career Karma.

CareerKarma is an online community that offers tools and advice to people looking to transition careers and break into tech for whatever reason. After answering a few simple questions, they connect you to different schools and provide insight about what is what and how to go about selecting a school. Having this support gave me the confidence I needed to navigate my options. And there are many awesome schools, offering bootcamps on Software Engineering, Cybersecurity, UX, and Data Science among others.

After reading the brief description for each program and each of the schools I got matched with, I felt like data science was the one that spoke to me. Then, I interviewed with three schools out of which I selected Flatiron School mainly because of two reasons: 1. Sammetra, my interviewer, was actually trying to get to know me and hear my motives as opposed to trying to sell me the program and 2. Flatiron’s core values align with mine.

What is data science?

• What is data? it is a collection of observations on something.
• What makes a data scientist a scientist? a scientist is just simply anyone who applies the scientific method when looking for solutions to a given problem.

Now the scientific method is a concept that I’ve known since age 11 and ever since I learned it, I became enamored with it because you can use it on anything and everything. It is where I go when I am having issues understanding something or when I run into a problem.

So, per my interpretation, Data Science is the art of applying the scientific method to data, with the purpose of solving a problem.

Why data science?

• High demand for data scientists: About 90% of data was created in the last few years alone, at 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a day! Yeah, that is a lot of data!
• Skills: I have a natural tendency to question everything and do lots of research before making most decisions so along with the scientific method, probabilities and statistics are old friends of mine. I’ve been relying on them ever since I can remember without being completely conscious of its great powers.
• It drives change: (for better or for worse) and I want to be a part of that. It was only recently that I decided to open myself to new knowledge and became fully aware of the many implications that the use and misuse of data could have and how it impacts our lives.
• I read in one of the O’Reilly books “Data Science from Scratch” something that goes “data scientist knows more statistics than a programmer and more programming than a statistician”. I thought cool, that’s exactly who I want to be.

Conclusion

I’m here because I have a career in Hospitality that as many other things in the world, lost value as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nothing is ever going to be as it once was.

Now, there’s so much data out there and we don’t really know what to do with it. And some people are using it for the wrong ends. So I decided it’s time to get hands down, grab the bull by the horns and take some of this data and very carefully put it to great use that will benefit everyone fairly.

Flatiron’s inclusive approach to education offers me the possibility to do exactly that. So here I am. Attempting to conquer the world one datum at a time.