My Data Science Journey

In this post, I have summarized my data science learning journey and experience so far. The post describes a quick history on how I got excited about data science. In the next post (link below) I have shared the chronological order of online courses, reference materials and basically content I have gone through in my path.

I am originally from Azerbaijan and my first degree was in Tourism Management. I took the degree on due to various factors such as lack of good BA degree courses as well as the quality of education in the country. Azerbaijan Tourism Institute (currently Azerbaijan Tourism Management University) was quite new and promising with high quality education and no shady mechanisms governing education whatsoever. Later on I got involved in the IMC Krems Program which is basically double degree program. I graduated in 2012 with 2 degrees and lots of tourism management related skills :)

Despite that, later on I have worked for 3-4 years as a IT Business Analyst across different domains and projects. My first major business analyst job was as part of the European Games which was organized in Baku, Azerbaijan back in 2015. Later on I moved on to doing similar job in Eurodesign, a regional IT service provider and consultancy. This experience really helped me to dive into the world of data even more.

Throughout my work experience I have done some data analysis across various projects, but never really went deeper. My journey into the world of data science has started in 2016 with Microsoft’s Professional Degree in Data Science. The link is also given in the timeline below. I was in the first iteration of the program, and Microsoft partnered with edx.org has just started this online degree. The degree introduced me into many aspects of data science. In the end all students had to do a Capstone Project (which I also have shared in the post below). Follwing the successful completion of the Professional Degree I decided to dive deeper into this wonderful area, that is constantly changing and evolving. I enrolled in University of Tartu’s “Innovation & Technology Management” Degree where I tried to focus on data analytics and took extra courses on Machine Learning, Math and Statistics. During those years I also participated in Swedbank’s Business Intelligence (BI) Academy program.

‘Data Science Learning Path’ basically describes all of the various online courses, university courses, books and reference materials I have gone through in my journey.