My Journey to Self-Taught Data Scientist

I became a Data Scientist by quitting my job and competing in Kaggle competitions.

This is my Kaggle profile. And yes, that’s a picture of me holding a catfish!

After I graduated from college in early 2014, I knew that I wanted to become a Data Scientist, but I didn’t have the skillset yet. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I needed to learn to get my foot in the door, but I was sick of being in school, didn’t have much money, and didn’t want to borrow $60,000 to get a Master’s degree.

I had a job lined up at Amazon in Seattle after I graduated since I had interned on the Prime team as a financial analyst during my junior year. I decided to go back because I knew that that I’d learn valuable skills like Excel, SQL, and be constantly working with data at a rapidly growing tech company. I would save up some money while figuring out what my next step was going to be.

I had discovered Kaggle in late 2013, and was obsessed with the potential of machine learning and data science to transform business and the world, but every time I tried to work with a dataset other than Titanic I felt lost. It didn’t help that whenever I attempted to train a machine learning algorithm on a Kaggle dataset it would takes hours to finish (my laptop at the time only had 4 Gb of RAM — it was 2014 and I didn’t have…