The Solitude of Data Science: Looking for a Kindred Spirits

Hello!

I’ll try to keep this short because I’m terrible at being concise.

I came from a different world—operations and sales. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I wanted to move away from... well, salespeople. I applied for a dev job at my company and got rejected, but they saw potential in my knowledge and experience with machine learning, deep learning, and some other rogue projects I had been working on.

They asked if I could develop a proof of concept (POC) to present to our board of directors. The company had previously attempted to work with three external teams, but none of those efforts were successful. I presented the POC, and it went exceptionally well. We secured funding and created a junior data science position specifically for me. Previously, the company had no such role or anything similar. While the IT team is very strong, they haven’t had the capacity to handle initiatives like this.

Since then, I’ve been obsessed—reading everything I can and taking stats classes for a certificate program at MIT (with plans to continue my education). I’m pretty sure I’ve been driving my wife and friends crazy because I love talking about this stuff. I’m genuinely passionate about it!

That said, I still have so much to learn and need to overcome my imposter syndrome. On top of this fast-moving environment, I’ve never worked in IT before, never used Jira, or been involved in their overall processes, so I’m navigating that learning curve too. I’d love to connect with others here, hear your stories, and get more involved in this r/datascience community!