Starting My Data Science Journey

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve had the courage to sit down and write something, but I decided that I really should do it. I have a (relatively) good reason to write this post today, as I very recently obtained my second certification from Coursera from the Data Science Specialization track. It’s been an interesting journey through the courses, and I’ve got 7 left!

The first one was just the fundamentals of data science, but the second course was an introduction to the programming language “R”. I don’t know why they decided to name this language just “R” because it’s not very SEO friendly 😀 (omg, is that an emoji in an article?!). Anyways, I haven’t had to learn a language like this since my Visual Basics classes in high school, and I gotta say, those didn’t go so well. Interestingly enough, even after years of working with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and a bunch of other languages, which I had to learn through working or fixing something, the process of learning a new language wasn’t any easier. I really struggled to get the projects done properly and on time. Not that R is specifically difficult, but because I always worked either on existing code or had to write something super specific, I was actually lacking all the basics of programming.

There’s a lesson for all you programming newbies right there: don’t think that just because someone knows how to work with a language that they actually understand it or know exactly how it works. To get you through the day, you don’t always need to know the scope of the language. Instead, most of the time you just need to know why that button doesn’t work like it should, and a simple Google search can solve it. You just need to know what to look for, and what to change.

“Why are you learning data science when you’re a marketer?”, you might say. Well, there’s a lot of data when you’re working in marketing. All those digital touchpoints generate data, which you can gather, manipulate, study and act on, if you’re smart. So, I’m trying to get smart. I’ve set up all my collectors and trackers, I can see the basic data outputs, and now it’s time to grow up and dig through that data to find that tiny gold nugget of wisdom.

That’s all for today, but I will definitely be writing more on this in the future, so stay tuned!