About Me / My Data Journey
Born and raised in Los Angeles, I spent my college undergraduate years in the beautiful city of Santa Barbara. After attending and gaining credits at Santa Barbara City College, I eventually transferred to UC Santa Barbara in 2020-2021 to pursue my bachelors in economics.
It wasn’t until my last year at UCSB that I started to explore and fall in love with the field of data analysis. Two courses in particular that I took at UCSB were responsible for this: Data Wrangling and Labor Economics. In both of these classes, we used R to analyze all sorts of data related to economic questions/subjects.
In my Labor Economics course, for example, we used the quantmod library to pull data from the FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) website’s API into R in order to analyze and plot metrics like the labor force participation rate, vacancy rates, unemployment rates, etc.
On the other hand, the Data Wrangling course was much more focused on actual R programming and true data analysis (as the name may imply). Here, my R skills grew exponentially as we completed challenging and nuanced weekly assignments and projects. Additionally, I got to spend some time tutoring/assisting many of my peers as they came to me for guidance on how to approach certain data problems or how to use R/RStudio.
Shortly before graduating, I knew that I wanted to fully commit myself to a career in data analytics (and perhaps data science in the future), as it was something that I genuinely loved doing and felt that I was great at. I ended up taking and completing the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate shortly after graduating (spring 2023) and started applying to jobs throughout the entire year.
After months of applying to a very saturated job market with no luck, I decided to use my time to further advance my skillset and abilities even more, which is when I decided to enroll in the Data Science Specialization offered by John Hopkins University. Needless to say, my data analytics/science skills flourished even more than they had already throughout the past year of vigorous learning.
With a plethora of technical skills now under my belt, I realized that I was still lacking foundational business insight/experience. It was at this time that I discovered the Analytics Accelerator program taught by Christine Jiang, former Director of Analytics for Vimeo. I was lucky enough to be selected for this competitive 2 month cohort of like-minded budding analysts in order to learn key skills that are seldomly taught in depth elsewhere such as soft skills, domain knowledge, analytical thinking, requirements gathering, and communicating insights to audiences and stakeholders. Being able to work on real world projects in a team-like setting using industry relevant tools and practices (Excel, Tableau, SQL) really helped me think about the big picture and how analytics is actually used, applied, and conducted within businesses.
Now that I have a much broader, informed, and holistic approach to analytics as well as a multitude of technical skills and relevant projects to show for it, I am more than confident enough to re-enter the job market and pitch myself accordingly. I am eager to provide value and effect positive change for others, and will continue to improve my skillset indefinitely!