Who am I and What am I Doing Here?

My name is Grant Hicks, I am currently taking a Data Science course at General Assembly and am writing this post to introduce myself and discuss what led me here and why I am interested in studying data.

I grew up in Alaska, my family moved around a lot while I was growing up so I got to see many different areas of that very unique state. I attended high school in a small quirky town that had a cat as a mayor. Upon graduating high school I joined the army and attended the United States Military Academy at West Point where I studied management and systems engineering. I ended up being medically discharged from the army during my third year at the academy, which led me back home to Alaska where I continued seeking my degree at the University of Alaska Anchorage. At this point I was very confused on which direction I wanted to go after that drastic shift. I found myself changing majors often, including at points finance, math, even anthropology for a while until I ended up again moving across the country when I transferred to Eastern Kentucky University. I eventually ended up graduating in 2014 with a degree in general studies as I had amassed such a variety of credits across different subjects and was looking at a big financial commitment if I took much longer.

After college I continued working in food service and tech support though neither area was something that I felt that I wanted to continue in the long term. I knew that I enjoyed problem solving and working with technology, and with a good background in math I started looking for an area that I could work in that would utilize these things. When looking back at the classes that I enjoyed most in college I remembered mathematical modeling and a class working with large amounts of anthropological data using the r programming language. With this in mind I found that data science was a field that I was interested in looking into and could see myself doing. I started learning on my own by taking some basic python courses online through platforms like Udemy and edX, though I was progressing slowly on my own.

My workplace was put on halt with the pandemic in March of 2020 and like many others I found myself with a lot of free time. I decided to take advantage of that and start getting more serious about learning what I needed to learn to make a career change. I continued learning on my own but I knew that I would need a course with some more structure to have some more direction in what I needed to be learning when trying to get into this field. My studies slowed down quite a bit when my workplace opened back up for a bit in the fall though it did not last and I again found myself without any work. I again started learning things on my own and while I felt like I was getting a good grasp on the basics but did not really know where to go from there.

I looked at bootcamps previously while looking for a new field at first and after looking around for a while I decided that General Assembly seemed like a good fit for me and that I was at a good point in my learning to start one of their courses. I started with a one week python course focused on working with data, and after completing that course I decided to commit to the full time Data Science immersive course. Getting more in depth with working with data confirmed that I was taking the right steps in the direction that I wanted to go, and after the one week course I felt confident that I was well prepared to start the full time course.

I am very excited to be making this change and start this journey, and I look forward to continuing my learning even beyond this course. One of the things that I find most intriguing about this field is that there is always something new to learn and so many ways to apply concepts. I hope to soon find myself in a new career that is more exciting and fulfilling to me where I can work to solve problems and find new insights using data.