I remember stepping off the jetway into Lambert Airport in St. Louis, MO. The feeling was surreal. It was March of 2017 and I had just spent the last 13 months teaching English in South Korea.
The feeling of coming back home was a complicated one, a swirling mixture of sadness for the end of an amazing journey and excitement for the beginning of a new one. Soon I would see my family members who had been mere faces on a screen for the past year. Soon I would see my friends and learn about what they had been up to since I’d been gone. Soon I would be broke.
While Korea was a life-changing experience, it certainly was not a profitable one. I had a few thousand dollars saved. It was enough to last me four months if I stretched, but I needed more. I needed a job.
Luckily for me I had wisely chosen to study math and computer science in college, so I actually had a foundation of technical skills that could be cultivated to start a career. Plus, while I had been overseas I started to read about this new thing called “Data Science.” I wasn’t really sure what it meant exactly (I still wonder sometimes), but I knew it involved working with math, machine learning, and computers. Naturally, I was intrigued, so I began studying a little bit each day before going to work.
When I came back home I learned about a non-profit organization called LaunchCode through a friend of mine. Their mission was to get people working in tech based on their skills rather than their degrees. I put together a couple of sample projects to show what I could do and applied to their program. I was overjoyed when they accepted my application. Eventually they offered to place me in a 90-day internship in a new data science team at Graybar Electric, and I happily accepted!
Those first few months at Graybar were spent cutting my teeth on code and collaboration. What I learned most during that time was just how different industry work operated compared to academic work. There weren’t any classes or grades or clubs. There was just our team and the projects that the team needed to get done.
I loved collaborating with others on difficult problems, and I could tell that I was learning quickly. I was lucky to find myself among a young and scrappy team, made up of other people like me who wanted to learn and prove they could do this kind of work well. It was composed of misfits who had tried their hand in some other discipline before pivoting into the exciting new field of data science, and at the head of this motley crew was my boss, Jeremy Salazar, who was the scrappiest of us all.
I truly enjoyed those first months working at Graybar, and I guess I proved something to them, because they offered me a job at the end of the internship. Less than 6 months after coming home, I had started a career in data science.
As I write about this time in my life, I’m overcome with a sense of gratitude for having gotten the chances that have gotten me to where I am today. I was the beneficiary of the opportunities presented by Korea, LaunchCode, and Graybar, and I will always be grateful for having received them. After working at Graybar for a few years, another opportunity presented itself. I moved to Boulder, CO to begin a graduate education in Computer Science, but that’s for another post.