CHALLENGES OF A DATA SCIENCE NEWBIE

At the point of writing this article, I'm trying to improve the accuracy of my model without overfitting. I've successfully lost motivation and I'm feeling headaches. How rewarding. 🙄 I'm not giving up on my Data Science journey but that doesn't eliminate the fact it has its challenges. Tons of challenges

SELF HELP

The Data Science Community in Nigeria is small in comparison to Web development and other aspects of tech. It's a lot smaller, permit me to say minute in Kaduna. Whenever I encounter challenges, I have to take hours sometimes days to find the solution. If you want to start your journey in Data Science, have it in mind that you'll have to figure out a lot on your own. If you're the kind of person that prefers a conventional school, then Data Science is not for you.

IMPOSTER SYNDROME

Imposter Syndrome is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a "fraud". Whenever a task is given to me, the imposter syndrome kicks in. I immediately feel inadequate and Kaggle adds fuel to the situation. 🤣🤣 Some notebooks look so lit and professional. God when?? I usually overcome this by learning new things from other notebooks and pushing myself very hard to complete the task no matter how "unprofessional" it looks. The bitter truth is, I still don't know a lot but if I let the Imposter Syndrome get to me, I won't achieve anything. I constantly learn new things and keep my mind open to new ideas, libraries, and updates.

NETWORK AND DATA

It's called "Data" Science for a reason. I've spent a whole lot of money on data and sometimes the Return on Investment (ROI) is not impressive. Other times, the Internet Service Providers do the most. The network goes down for hours and you can't do anything. Sometimes, I have to climb a tree to get an internet connection. Lol, I've never done that, but you get the picture. The network gets really bad, makes you unproductive and demotivated.

UNSTRUCTURED LEARNING

I taught myself the majority of what I know in Data Science without a specific structure. Videos seem too complicated, textbooks are boring and courses are expensive 😭 I bought a book titled the Data Science Workshop on Packt so far it's working for me. I intend to stick with it to the very end.

DEMOTIVATION

Sometimes all these challenges affect my morale and I feel like throwing in the towel. Then I remind myself of who I am, why I started in the first place, and where I intend to be in the future. Other times, I know motivation won't cut it, and that's where discipline comes in. I've trained myself to code every day no matter what I face. It has helped increase my resilience and will to break into the field of Data Science with a bang 💥

Finally, I can't overemphasize this.... NETWORK! When you meet people in Data Science, speak to them. Get their contacts and ask for help! It is really important to have people of like minds around, who are on the same mission as you. Thank you for reading to my rant to the end 💕