MY JOURNEY INTO TECH

My journey into tech started early last year. There was a program organized specially for women to encourage women to go into tech. Since I wasn't doing anything then i decided to sign up for the program.

On the first day of the class, the instructor gave an introduction and told us what software development is. He said software development is simply creating a software to solve the needs of a business, a community, for personal use etc, yeah I liked the part of solving the needs of my community because I love helping people which explains why I want to go into community development. He then went ahead to explain the various software development jobs available, some of which include web development, app development, gaming development, data science etc. Immediately he mentioned data science and went on to explain what it was all about, I just knew that was were I belonged, I loved the whole idea of prediction,While the class was going on I pondered on the fact that if there was a way to know things before they happen, then a lot of problems can be avoided and it will be much easier to proffer solutions, all the while looking at it from a social works point of view.

Classes progressed and since there wasn't enough tutors for the different stacks, we were going to be taught only the web development stack. Classes started and my mind was still on data science. I eventually left the program to go back to school because it will be so much of  a workload for me to combine both.

School resumed back but i still had plans to find a way to learn data science, so i went on Facebook and followed a lot of data science pages, also Facebook suggested a lot of pages for me to follow that was related to ML, Data Science, AI etc (I later found out its an ML thingy. Facebook using ML learns from all my likes and searches and suggests pages related to all that i have been liking and searching). I also started doing some low key reading about the whole thing.

School went on break for the semester and I was back home. Since I was still in contact with the Hub where I had my training I saw an ad about a data science training organized by data science Nigeria. It was a 6-week training with one contact per week, I signed up for it immediately.

The day for the commencement of the training came and I was super excited, on the first day of class everything was so new, at a point I wasn't even understanding a thing. I was expecting to get an intro to python or something but instead we were given a template with a problem and asked to proffer a solution using ML, I was like okay, I love solving problems but I wasn't expecting it to be this way. It was after the class that I found out that it was an advanced class for people who already have a sound knowledge of python, Stats and the like I had joined. I was like woaw!!! Now I know why I wasn't understanding a thing, it also turned out that I was the only lady (the small one for that matter) among several hefty men, lol. You would've expected that I would quit after the first day but hell no, I continued till the very last day although I didn't understand most of what was taught. The only thing I achieved from the training was having a Zindi and Kaggle account.😆. The instructor seeing my resilience picked interest in me, we got talking and that was how he knew I had little or no knowledge of data science but was just a beginner. He then told me the steps I have to follow to be a data scientist with the help of some resources he shared. It wasn't so bad after all huh.😌

I continued on the path and I signed up for few other programs of which most were crash courses, one wouldn't get the complete details. Most of my learning was self taught and unstructured, the whole process wasn't easy but I kept on until something significant happened that placed me on the curve of growth.