My journey into adulthood began 8 years ago — when I decided to attend college, after barely getting by in High School. I started attending Shippensburg University as an undeclared student, hoping I could find some subject that would interest me; being a fan of science, I heard Chemistry calling my name. Since I entered the program a year and a half into my stay at college, I knew I was already 4 years behind my classmates, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me; unfortunately for me, back then, I was not a very good student. Failing the very first class required by my new major was more sad than disappointing — to me, that was my ticket to a great job once I graduate — so failing assured a narrow scope for a meaningful Chemistry career.

Eventually, I decided on a different future and declared my “backup” major, French. My experience as a language major was both challenging and straightforward — I excelled when I took the language in High School which made it very easy to dive into the content at a collegiate level, but when it came to the creative aspect, I fell short; thus, I spent much longer than I should have in school. Six years later (after taking classes both full-time and part-time and paying as I went), I walked down the auditorium aisle and accepted my symbolic diploma, knowing I would have to wait another 8-or-so weeks to actually hold it in my hands; however, my accomplishment felt bittersweet.

I let out a sigh of relief, knowing I was rewarded a degree for my struggles; yet, I continued to doubt the efficacy of a meaningful career in French. I knew when I entered the program that I did not want to teach as I didn’t feel that I had the patience for students; so, I thought about the idea of translation/interpretation. While I felt very confident writing papers using an advanced level of French and doing very well translating texts while staying faithful to the author’s goals, I was not very good at interpretation, and that seemed to be the central aspect sought after in translation.

Fast forward to several weeks ago, still unsure of what to do but working as much as I can in retail as a labourer — my partner mentions, “I’ve been attending this coding boot camp for some time with the prospect of finding a good job after graduation”; so, I pondered the benefits and decided to follow the same path and apply to be a part of one of their Data Science cohorts. If you were to ask me what I would be doing after obtaining a degree in French, the last phrase I would expect to reply with would be “Learning to code in Python for Data Science.”

It seemed simple enough. I loved learning languages and Python, a computer language, seemed to fit that category. I still don’t think I could explain clearly what Data Science is as everything is still very new to me, but I seem to be getting the hang of things. I spent 2 weeks prior to the start of the course completing pre-coursework learning the basics in Python (lists, functions, variables, etc.) while moving onto things such as data exploration using a library with an innocent name called Pandas, and linear regression, which I haven’t touched since I took science-related math classes 5-or-so years ago. Little did I know, I would be excited to pick up (and remember) algebra again and use it to make graphs interpreting and projecting data and for the first time, I feel this could be the start of a meaningful career of which I can be proud.