Data Science Journey
5 min readSep 14, 2020
For the last 2 and a half years, I worked as a quality engineer at Collins Aerospace In Rockford Illinois. They manufactured ram air turbines and generators for all the major aircrafts. Material that didn't meet print(non conforming hardware) would come to the ‘quality clinic’ and I'd work with other engineers, planners, and supplier quality to help support the disposition of the material. For my first job out of college it was wonderful because I was able to get my hands on the product we actually made and got to see the entire manufacturing process. Also, seeing first how one of the largest aerospace companies operates was astonishing. Although I was captivated for a lot of my time there, I quickly realized that one of the downfalls of a large company is how many loopholes you have to jump through to get stuff done. There is process and standard work for everything which sometimes slows down a simple solution, but this really taught me the importance of communication and keeping everyone on the same page. I enjoyed the collaboration that came with getting projects done as well as the ability to work on my own for daily tasks. Part of the role was weekly/monthly reporting that was previously done manually and I was able to automate using Visual basic which was the final push I needed to move towards the data science field.I, like many others, wasn't sure about what I wanted to do after graduating high-school. I ended up going to community college to take several classes to see what would interest me, one of them being a VBA course. Unfortunately, my instructors made the material uninteresting that it took away a lot of my interest in programming. I wish I gave it another chance knowing what I know now. I still wanted to do some kind of engineering and I always had a passion for space. It was hard not to when I grew up watching Cosmos with Carl Sagan. I imagine he influenced an entire generation of youth to go into a space related field and I was one of them. The following year I attended Iowa state to pursue an aerospace engineering degree. I enjoyed it immensely and especially the programming aspect of it. By Junior year I started to get burnt out. All the propulsion and aerodynamic classes became less interesting, but at this point I was so far into my major that I felt stuck. It definitely didn't help that my roommate was a computer engineer and was trying to get me to switch. If college wasn’t so expensive I might have switched right then, but i decided to stick with it. When I graduated I already had two aerospace related internships and a degree so I figured I might as well give it a shot. Which brought me to Collins Aerospace.If I didn't love my job, my plan was to save up money as soon as I started working and eventually get some kind of education in programming. At this time I wasn’t sure of any other options other than going back to school for a masters. Luckily six months into my job, a friend of mine did a bootcamp who had had no previous experience in coding being an exercise science major. After he graduated he was able to secure a job and highly recommended doing a bootcamp. I looked into more bootcamps for the next couple years while saving money and it seemed like a better option than going back to get a masters which would likely take another two years and cost me a lot more. By the start of 2020 I had the means to do a bootcamp and started trying several different languages using code academy and took a liking to Python. It seemed similar to what I liked doing at work so much which was collecting tons of data that was driving our business decisions. It seemed like python was user friendly and was the heart of a lot of data science which seemed like a perfect fit. A large part of data science overlapped what I liked about my job; extracting information, organizing it, and understanding the importance of it. Even in my personal life I was always the kind of person to organize and refine stuff so it can be done as efficiently as possible, that was part of the reason I went into the engineering field in the first place. By then, I started realizing that it was used in all fields and really what drove decision making. Last year another friend of mine did the Flatiron data science bootcamp in Chicago and talked about all the cool projects and how much he liked the course. He knew I was looking into doing one so he highly recommended Flatiron. I heard good things about it and they were one of the few offering data science so I decided to do it. I was going to apply to the class in May, but with the way the economy and everything was I decided to hold off till Fall. I knew it still probably isn't the best time to do it, but I realized there is never going to be a perfect time.It’s exciting to be in a field that is growing and the community is very supportive of one another. I'd like to work for a mid size company where I can learn a lot from the people I'm around, but also make an impact on the company. It's too hard to say what industry I'd like to be at this point, but as I continue to learn hopefully I'll be able to narrow down the kind of work I’d like to do. There is always a chance to go back to the aerospace industry and maybe being on the data science side of it would make it more interesting to me. Once I find a company I’d want to work for, I'd like to get my masters in machine learning or a similar field that will help me grow this into a lifelong career. The machine learning aspect of data science is intriguing to me because of how new it is. I’m excited to see all the future applications for it and hopefully be a part of building them one day.
