Welcome to the Future!

I am back from a long break! But I was never really gone! My graduate studies consumed the last remaining bit of my time. As I am nearing graduation, I wanted to share my thoughts on the strategy I followed in the previous five years.

I realized that staying at one company would not give me exposure to areas of development I wanted to be in. I got jobs to work on software support, services layer, and ETL. My goal was to get myself ready to work on BI and data science systems. I now believe I have laid the foundation for myself to answer various business-related problems using software and data analysis techniques.

The fundamental truth that I hold dear is that everyone should have access to knowledge and an opportunity to understand it. I am thrilled that I met many people willing to help me grow personally and professionally. My professors, managers, recruiters, meetup and conference organizers, religious leaders, and family have been great! I want to thank all of them!

One of my professors, Rafail Gazizov, said that somebody with will and persistence would eventually reach their goal. When I told my peers that I wanted to become an architect in five years, I knew that would not happen. In fact, what is an architect? There are many kinds. Software, systems, buildings, business, solutions architects… I meant that I wanted to have worked in many different areas and gain a broader view of the world. I wanted to expand horizontally. Plus, you never know who you will meet tomorrow, so I literally could have become an architect.

It is always better to be at fault, and taking the blame takes the weight off your shoulders because you don’t have to blame anyone. In that spirit, I want to blame myself for failing to become an architect. However, I now have a broad view of the software industry and am ready for more exciting work.

I wanted to also thank another professor for giving me a unique perspective on science. Nagiza Samatova is an extraordinary professor who gave me the bigger picture. Her math understanding is phenomenal. However, what makes her a great professor is her view of the larger picture. I wanted to share a few points that she shared with my class about analytical talent.

• Decision science skills – translating business questions to data

• Interpersonal and business skills – taking advantage of data

• Business analytics skills – translating data to decisions

• Advanced analytics skills – statistics, ML, data mining

• Data management skills – SQL, ETL, data prep, data readiness and QA

I have learned all five of these! In five years! The time is coming to apply these. And I am eager. I am fairly certain that I will not land a job as a data scientist or AI adopter straight out of college. I don’t need to. I have successfully conducted side projects before. If I take all the time I spend on school assignments and projects – that is enough time to build many side projects that take advantage of my newly learned skills. That is how I am going to pave the road. I will not hoard my knowledge and my work. University policy prevents me from sharing most of my submissions with the rest of the world, but I hope all my future side projects will be open source.

I want to give special thanks to Caroline Evans, who has been helping me through this busy time. I would not be able to do much of this without her help. The future is almost upon us. Everyone has the right to look for a better life, and let’s make now even better than it already is.