She Code Africa Mentorship: The Breathtaking Journey.
She code Africa is not just a community, It is family. No matter how much I dreaded writing this article because it truly meant the program has come to an end, I have to write it. but, on the bright side, It also means I get to brag about the awesome experience I had as a She Code Africa Mentee. This article is about my journey at SCA in the last 90 days. Before you start reading, refer to this article to read about the first-month journey.
About She code Africa
They are a non-profit organization focused on celebrating and empowering young Girls and Women in Technology across Africa. Click this link to donate/partner with them. Their partners and donors go a long way in creating an impact and helping them reach thousands of women in technology across Africa!
I got into the mentorship program (Data Science track) organized by the amazing team at SCA three months ago. When I applied to be a mentee and being accepted, I was a baby data scientist, and being accepted is the highlight of my year so far.
My First Month — One step at a time
This month was about navigating new territories for me. We learned the foundational topics in Data Science which include Programming, Maths, and Data Analysis. I also wrote my very first article this month. The in-depth analysis and insights I did felt so good and exciting.
My Second Month — Wow Effect
During this month, we learned basic SQL, SQL joins, SQL Aggregations, some advanced SQL queries, using tableau and power bi for visualizations, and creating insightful dashboards. I participated in most of Hackerrank SQL challenges and got a gold badge. Using tableau and power bi for visualization instead of python was a challenge at first for me, but later I got the hang of it.
My Third Month — The completion!
This month was about machine learning and its concepts. As my final project, I worked on Craigslist used car dataset from Kaggle. To say this dataset stressed me is an understatement, I spent two weeks wrangling the dataset before I could extract my final data frame that used in building my models. My model performed very well so the stress was definitely worth it (chuckles). I learned a lot, grew immensely and now I am a full-fledged data/machine learning Scientist.
Why will I continue to be a data/machine learning scientist?
I am choosing to answer this question in this article because this is a question my mentor asked us during our meeting after the SCA graduation ceremony.
I love working with data. Data tells stories we don't even know we are searching for and it shapes how we live our lives and the choices we make. Something that may seem as simple as recommender systems recommending that awesome job that you end up applying for and later got, or your business getting better because of insights gotten from your data. Working with data excites me because I see data as a journey and each dataset has its own story and solution to the problem we are trying to solve. I can spend hours talking about everything data but for today I will stop here. You can follow me to read about my articles on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science. Thank you for reading.
