I studied psychology for five long years at university, but fell in love with data along the way.

When I had to prepare my thesis, the final work before graduating, I needed to carry out research that involved gathering and analyzing data. I barely knew any tools for processing, cleaning, and analyzing data, so I resorted to the only one I had used at least a little: Excel. My girlfriend (now my wife) taught me how to work with pivot tables to better examine and summarize data. I finished my thesis relying on Excel, created beautiful graphs, and earned a 98 as my final grade. That moment made me fall in love with data, and from there I started taking multiple courses to learn data analysis.

After several years of taking courses and learning on my own, I finally landed my first data job — just a few weeks ago. I am delighted, because I had dreamed of this for a long time and I’m so glad I finally achieved it, thank God. This came a few months after I decided to get more serious about my learning. It isn’t a requirement for my job, but I wanted to go deeper into Data Science, so I enrolled in an associate degree program.

Now I work as a Business Intelligence professional, but I haven’t stopped learning — because this is not the end. Someday, I want to be able to call myself a Data Scientist.