So in the end, why am I even studying Data Science? Why do I want a career in Data Science?

My initial motivation and the one reason I gave until now is that it was in the continuation of what I was doing while working in quality management.

I mean, my very first project as an intern was basically a cluster analysis. OK, done in Excel and very rudimentary but still.

A more personal reason is that I like to understand how things work. And how they work. That is what lead me to engineering in the first place after all. I also wanted to build robots. Thank you Asimov and Asimo for that. And I mean it. In high school, I actually started studying AI. Until my parents told be “It’s only in video games, there’s no future in it.” Well… mechanical engineering it is then. Getting to understand how to build something, from a bridge to an airplane, or understanding what makes a metal react this way and why a ceramic has a completely different behaviour. I liked that. In a way, I am nostalgic of that time. Even if I was still not building robots.

But the following years, my experiences working in Quality led me to different analysis. Focussing more on processes. Trying to understand dependencies and networks. Trying to summarize 10 different reglementations in one understandable document (working in the European railway has its challenges). (Trying to explain to engineers what accounting is was also … interesting).

Excel remained but the analysis changed. Way less numbers, more text. Pivot tables morphed into task trackers.

And I started wondering what to do next. I had some engineering background but was working in Business. Two choices in front of me. Neither bad on paper.

Go back to engineering.

Get better at business.

I took the second choice. Did an MBA (and started learning Japanese at the same time).

But the drive to understand the world, to dissect how things work actually grew stronger. The engineer part of me started to grow restless. More and more as work drove me further away from what I was interested in.

So I want to go back being an engineer. Business is fine. I learned a lot. It gave me another way to look at things (economic analysis and modeling will stay with me for sure). But that’s it.

I know there are still huge gaps in my skills (and the imposteur syndrome is extremely strong in me). Stats, pure maths, clean code, those are things I need to work on.

But to close this article and TL;DR:

• I still want to understand the world and data analysis/science is the best way for me to do it
• if I can build a robot along the way, I’ll be happy