Dear reader:
I’ve written the following to address the multiple times I’ve been asked and postponed my answer. The following is a rough collection — at best — of my current thoughts that I hope to refine over time.
Some Thoughts
My career has been more closely aligned with the general way I like to look at the world, rather than a particular job or industry. By that, I mean that I am not in a field that I studied, or in the profession I saw myself in when I started university — I am in a field that reflects the way that I like to look at and begin to understand things.
Prior to University
When i was around 10 years old I was really inspired by this robot made by kazuhiko kosuge that was made to dance with you by taking the complementary ballroom stance. This is amazing because this opens a world of possibilities for assistive technology, and if this became mainstream, we could live in a world where there’s less reliance on human caretakers and folks could live with greater independence. There’s no concern or waiting if there’s a shortage of nurses to assist the disables. The future could be huge.
That idea stuck with me. The idea of making robots for a greater good. Understanding that there would be limited work that I could accomplish by myself I decided that I would like to design the physical object and leave its intelligence and understanding of the situation to someone in software. I’ve always been a crafty kid, so this also contributed to my decision. I would be a robotics engineer.
…or at least a mechanical engineer; I ultimately chose a university for networking purposes over one that would be better known for its engineering program — this comes into play when I learned that I didn’t like mechanical engineering.
I realized that the complexity of most mechanical engineering projects would require someone to be hyper focused on a specific aspect of building any machine, intelligent or otherwise. I preferred getting a broad overview rather than focusing on a niche area, and quickly realized that it was unlikely that I would find any of the job prospects of mechanical engineering, especially within a major city, interesting.
All while I was going through my first year and debating my studies choice in my second, I had made a group of friends who were alumni and rising seniors who were more than happy to give me suggestions and advice. It was at this turning point that I asked what to do.
Mentor
I asked for suggestions and he suggested analytics. I started taking a online course for analytics using R. I enjoyed it and it felt interesting and also started using tableau.
My decision to go with analytics — initially — was largely due to the trust of my mentor as a friend and someone more experienced than myself.
Post University
What pushed me forward the most in opportunities to learn analytics and get work on my resume was working part time at a friend’s company, the same friends who were upperclassmen and alumni that I met during my first year of university.
I took a lot of online courses and whatever projects I completed, I put onto my resume.
I made sure that my resume was reviewed by several folks, both the university job office — which i still view with much skepticism — as well as my excellent boss from the part time job I held on campus.
Ultimately, I easy applied for as many jobs as possible over the summer and in the fall, thousands of dollars in rent later, got a job as a jr ME. I didn’t like that so I kept applying and ended up at my first analyst role.
How to market yourself
Throughout my search, I marketed myself based on the skills I wanted to be using the most and had started growing, rather than the skills I held.
Because I had and continue to have strong confidence in my ability to learn new things and problem solve, I was able to speak with confidence during interviews regardless of my experience level. Even for programming languages I had yet to encounter, i would read up on them prior to interviews so that I could speak to them with some degree of intelligence. The greatest ally I had was myself, and the internet.
Building my skills/branding part 2
My first job was such a tosh. But thanks to that, it gave me a lot of time to work on side projects and learn programming while spending maybe an hour or two a day actually working on the work I was given.
I also spent such time carefully crafting my resume to make the best of the menial work I was doing. Improved an excel macro? I had optimized reporting. Made a python script to rename files? I automated a manual process to save time and money.
I focused on growing out my experience in the areas I wanted, while crafting a narrative for a job I’d like to be doing rather than the one I had. I focused on what I was working on, and what would be a more ideal version of that. I didn’t want to be writing file renaming in python, but I did want to be writing python to work with data.
The biggest thing about building this narrative around my first job, was a careful balance of what I knew I could do — through projects and learning on my own time — with what I actually did at the office.
What are essentials? How can I continue growing?
- Always think about what you want to be doing next, and focus your growth plan around that
- Remember that there’s a soft side to data as well, and that titles are vague or flexible, and sometimes both
- Find a job with challenges; if you can’t find one, create some for yourself — create intellectual challenges, don’t challenge yourself by getting the office to hate you.