Outside of my work, I have never tried to study any technical knowledge. Because of this Covid-19 pandemic, I decided to take a new journey in Data Science.

I have been working as a mechanical engineer for many years. Most of my routine job is dealing with many data. I have worked with many data from experiments and testings. Excel is the common tool that I have used with my data. Sometimes, I might make some script or simple programming to handle the data. However, this routine job is increasing every day and makes me start to think about the better way or more effective solution.

During this pandemic, I, fortunately, have more free time because I do not need to commute between the office and home. I took this chance to study more serious about Python programming. I have heard Google providing an online python automation course. Because I am quite familiar with programming, it does not take me a long time to complete the course. After I completed the course and applied it to my routine job, Python is amazing, and it helps me process data faster, easier, and more effectively. Because the result of Python is so amazing, I asked myself why I do not continue to study deeper.

Since Python is the common language in Data Science, it might be good to continue study data science. I looked into more detail what I could get from studying data science. I find that data science might change my life and give me more opportunities or flexibility.

From my experience, there are many problems that engineers or scientists still do not understand and cannot find a solution or explanation. However, data science can solve them. The solution can be created and predicted by using data and statistics. I think it is interesting if I could solve the problem without doing any experiment or less experiment.

A data scientist is a trending job after software engineer. More and more company start to hire data scientists for various tasks. For example, companies like Netflix and Spotify need a data scientist to understand their customer’s behavior from usage data and provide them with better solutions. Because the demand for jobs is increasing, the income of this position is similar to a software engineer. As we know, the salary of a software engineer in a developing country or silicon valley is very high. This is a good opportunity to change career with better pay.

Besides the reasons I mentioned, I also want flexibility in my working life. I was born in Thailand. I have moved out of Thailand and worked abroad for many years. I hope that I would to move back to Thailand or move closer to Thailand. I have tried applying for a mechanical engineer position many times in many countries, but it isn’t easy to get a job even in Thailand. This kind of difficulty seems to be less for computer science or engineer positions because they can work from anywhere from their laptop. I have a software engineer friend who started working in Japan, moved to Singapore, and soon move to the UK.

This pandemic is indeed a problem, but I try to look the other way, and I think it is an opportunity that could change or improve my life. No one would know unless I try. Because of these many reasons, I decided to take a new step in data science!