Start of my Data Science Journey
Hello my name is Alec Mills, I am a Computer Science Graduate form the University of Kansas. My data science journey begins when I was in high school. This is where I learned web design and really found my passion for working on computers. Learned HTML and CSS and used those skills to build a few websites for class. After I graduated high school, my next step was going to community college where I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do but still had that passion for working with computers so I took some math classes as prerequisites for whatever the next steps that lied ahead would be. I chose to take a java script class on top of my normal course load because I thought it could be fun not knowing that after I finished it would be the reason for heading to Kansas University to study Computer Engineering. After taking a few hardware classes, I decided that I would rather put my talents fully into the software side of things. This lead me to change my major and head into Computer Science. My journey in data science really begins to accelerate when I was a junior in college. As many others before me we have to take a lot of electives to try to narrow down our job search and find our place in the vast possibilities among the computer world has a Computer Science world. I selected an intro to AI as artificial intelligence has always peaked my interest. It was a course that I found marvelous, we learned about the AWS Deep-racer and how to make a little car Traverse around a track as fast as possible by self driving. We did this with reinforcement learning using reward functions. A reward function is where you either reward your car for in my case staying on the track and for moving fast. The longer you train and higher reward your car can get the better it will be able to move around various tracks. When approaching the career fair a year later it was important for me when researching company's that I would enjoy the type of work that I would be getting to work on. With keeping the intro to AI course in the back of my head while I was looking through the topics I ended up landing an internship as a ML engineer. This internship was over the course of my senior year, I learned about the pipeline and how training models work and also about the different models that exist. Along with that I was able to learned about data generation and how we were able to produce all of the images that we need to train our models on. After graduating from Kansas and completing this internship I found that I wanted to stay with the same company and they wanted me to diversify my skills and also add Data Science as a tool for my tool set. This would expand the capabilities of what I will be able to complete while working for them. That is how I found myself at Flat Iron as a student. With intensive pre-work I found very fast what the type of knowledge was going to be accessible to gain from taking this course. So far we dove into things from how to use the terminal to reading data as well as learning how to clean the data that we are able to find. I am most excited about learning how to create more and more ML models and seeing all the possibilities that we can achieve with them! Then lastly we will be able to present the data in a way to make it understandable for someone who isn’t in data science for them to be able to make educated decisions based of what I have given them to head in the right direction. The journey has just begun and everyday come to class thrilled to learn and apply the knowledge that I will gather in this boot camp. We have a long way to go and the light at the end of the tunnel is very faint but as we keep exploring into the world of becoming a data scientist, the light will continue to grow bigger and bigger with every assignment and lesson that we go through. With being in data science I plan to try to use my knowledge to make the world a better and much safer place to be for everyone.
