Outreachy: What I Ordered, What I Got and What I am Expecting
Phew what a ride, its been a month and some days since I started interning with outreachy. I must say, so far it has been an amazing and also exciting ride but one thing for sure is that I have really come a long way with something that seemed like a fleeting moment with outreachy and my organization ModECI.
To really understand this journey and what I want to talk about lets rewind to the very beginning when it all started. When applying to my organization, I had certain expectations about what I expected my internship to be like and the direction I intended for it to go, that is, my accomplishments and my goals for the internship but when i started my internship it was a whole lot more than I anticipated. It was an eye opener and a fresh perspective for my career as a data scientist.
I got to understand that data science was not only limited to the domain of computer science but also could be integrated and as well be valuable part of other fields such as neuroscience. I was astonished at this discovery and wondered the extent of its possibilities. Although I struggled with imposters syndrome and anxiety because I wasn't too familiar with this domain of data science and its application, I was ever so motivated inspired to prove myself worthy amongst great minds in the world of data science.
Because of my prior assumptions about the corporate work place environment of data scientist, my expectation was let down but in a good way, because I got the opportunity to work alongside wonderful, highly skilled, understanding and committed mentors and coworkers, I was able to quickly unlearn a whole lot of thoughts I was coming with and open my mind to new learn as much as I can.
With this found outlook on life as a data scientist, I have learnt and accomplished so much in such a short duration, being fully a self-taught data scientist by the way. As part of my accomplishment, I can proudly say and call myself a full fledge open source contributor working towards making the world better using one contribution at a time at a time. I am not going to lie; it feels so amazing to be part of something much bigger than myself, the feeling is unmatch and exhilarating to say the least. Look at me moving from just your regular data scientist to making contributions to one of the biggest AI convergence initiative.
Before this, I believed the tech space was static, now I know you will be wondering "what am I saying", but hear me out; I was of the opinion data scientist only do data science or data scientist things, but here I am less than a month into my internship, exploring new domain I never even knew existed. As a result, I have achieved and added various useful and skill set as part of my developer stack. I must say it is a trilling experience to gradually becoming a much more capable data scientist and ever closer to becoming more like my mentors.
As part of my achievements I have added DevOps, technical writing, open source contributor, working with git and github and a whole lot of other skills and experiences as part of my developer skill sets and stack.
I have touch a little bit about some of my many accomplishments but I also have some goals and expectation for the remainder of the internship. During my journey I have been able to reevaluate my goals and although, some of my goals and ideals still hold true, others are slightly altered while a few are completely altered. With the confirmation and new realization that data science can be fully integrated into biology as my organization have done in many ways and have achieved, I plan on using my previous experience as a microbiologist and now my new career as a data scientist to explore domains relating to medicine. As part of my goal for the remainder of the internship, I plan to have a more solid grounding the domains of data science integrated into health. I plan on using the expertise of my mentors, integrating their knowledge of the creating models that can be integrated or used in other fields to use in using data science to create biotechnology tools that will be use to improve health care and reduce mortality in human. I am particularly interested in the field of nephrology and the integration of data science toward predicting, preventing and discovering related illnesses before they reach chronic stages.