Why GA DSI?
I spent almost a decade on drilling rigs, and it was fun. It’s good work, things are comically overpowered and oversized, there was a lot of latitude in how I did things, and I was good at my job. I also didn’t live anywhere for most of a decade, and as much fun as traveling can be, it can also get pretty old. I have hundreds of past mailing addresses that I’ve had Amazon ship stuff to. I couldn’t even really have a cactus, it would’ve been too much moving too much disruption. I stayed strong doing that kinda work, but I got in pretty lousy anaerobic shape. Working rigs I’ve been burnt, frostbitten, electrocuted, blasted by sandstorms, bit at by snakes… and none of that damaged my body as sitting in one of the many lousy, busted Staples office chairs that populates every onsite telemetry office, hunched over the washed out company laptop.
I needed to do something else. While I was still in the industry, I started an at-your-own-pace data analyst course. Started learning some Python, a little Numpy, a little Pandas; a little regex but I didn’t retain a bit of that one. It was goin’ along but also I was training for the next step up the ladder in drilling telemetry and the data stuff ended up more and more on the backburner.
The oil industry wants everyone to remember that their market crashed because of the pandemic, but in reality it crashed a little before all that, due to… well, that’s just a Whole Damn Thing and besides the point. So I had some time, and I got back to work on the data analysis stuff, between mutual aid and disaster relief work
Once I started getting closer to the more abstract, more data sciencey stuff, I realized that I’d been learning so on my own that I’d surely built plenty of bad habits and didn’t really have a way to find out what those were without feedback. And the more abstract stuff was harder and it got easier to find myself ignoring the lessons. So, I figured it would be better to go the rest of the way with some people, some clever people who were on the same kinda path, more or less. One of my closest friends had done the GA full stack course a few years before and landed a dev job not too long after, and always spoke really highly of it, so once I got settled back in Reno I started looking into it, then got ahold of an admissions person, and, well, here we are.
I know that data science would be a good fit for me because it sits at an intersection of so many things I’m inherently drawn to and fascinated by, but I’m here in this more structured learning environment to get an idea of what kind of data science work I might be most inclined to do, as much as I am here to learn the methodology and theory stuff. I’m hoping that I will also be able to hone the direction I want to go in while I’m going through the course and working on these projects, and so far I’m already feeling better about all that. As much as I’m adjusting to living for hours a day in Zoom and Slack, I’m also adjusting to having a real 9 to 5 schedule for the first time ever. We’ve already had one really interesting guest lecture and I’m hoping that more of those give me ideas of what kinds of possibilities this course could be opening up for me.
