From Natural Science to Data Science

Hi, my name is Samantha Chu, and I am an aspiring data scientist.

I’ve almost completed my immersive data science “boot camp” with General Assembly, and it’s caused me to stop, think, and reflect on how far I’ve come. It’s been a rocky ride, but a very fruitful one as well.

About Me

I’m no stranger to working with data. It was not that long ago, when I recently graduated with my bachelor’s degree in nutritional physiology/biology. I remember collecting data in lab experiments and even visualizing healthcare data during a brief internship with the federal government’s healthcare agency. At the time, my desire to help others fueled my pursuit of a health professions degree throughout this time of my life. However, little did I know that my internship at the federal healthcare agency would lead to a complete pivot in career directions.

Introduction to Business Analytics

Life rarely goes as we plan, and I found myself enjoying numbers, statistics, and puzzles more so than patient care. During my internship with the Department of Health and Human Services, I was exposed to a lot of data related to physician fraud, and healthcare service waste and abuse. I saw the use of data to help prevent fraud and prevent patients from being taken advantage of. Seeing how I could use data to help others too was eye-opening, and I found a lot of enjoyment doing math to make a difference.

This realization led me to enroll in a business analytics graduate degree, where I learned data analytics tools such as SQL, R, Python, and Tableau.

I began to realize the power of looking at data in the past, and present to help predict the future, and I wanted to really stretch, grow, and learn how data could be used for predictive analytics. With my background in business analytics, I set out to find a boot camp that would really bring my skills to the next level.

Data Science Immersive

General Assembly’s name was not new to me. In fact, there were a lot students from my business school that had taken General Assembly’s User Experience Design Immersive course, not to mention the various number of connections I had on LinkedIn who had also cited a General Assembly boot camp on their profile.

General Assembly’s reputation preceded them, to say the least, and I reached out to learn more about their Data Science Immersive course. Greeted with an attentive GA admissions adviser, and the impressive statistics of job placements on General Assembly’s website, I was sold with the program and the rest is history.

The Future

As I begin to reach the end of the General Assembly’s Data Science Immersive course, I look forward to applying my data skills in a variety of industries and contexts. Since being in the course, I’ve realized the number of possibilities within data science is numerous and that data science can really be found in every industry. From natural language processing to computer vision problems, I’m excited to see the types of impact that I can have with my new data science skills. I know it will be a life long journey of learning new skills, and new statistical models, but I’m excited to start and perhaps find my way back into the fraud data science and analytics space as well. I hope my story has encouraged you and perhaps demonstrated that while pivoting career directions may be scary, it’s not uncommon. It’s an invitation to discover more about yourself and your interests and to find where your interest and skills align. And that is how I found myself in data science!