So, how it all started?

Was it work with dumb excel tables to calculate totally random performance metrics at my first “real” post-university job, or was it a semester-long masters SPSS course, or was it 12 y.o amazement of how the (real physical) library (real physical) catalogues are organised, or was it a natural attraction to sorting/ordering/categorizing things since I was born? I’m not sure when was it the first time I was interested in data.

(No) Math to blame for a long path

But, as for many, math became an obstacle for me. Trigonometry and absolute disconnection of cosines and sines from real world (as I thought back then) was the first nail in the coffin of me thinking about some tech field. Tough time with physics, chemistry and astronomy didn’t add to the optimism. (Tho, I even took part in a city-level physics olimpiade in 9th grade, and even wasn’t the last one (I was the 5th from the end, if I remember correctly 😄))

BA in Humanities

So, when the time came, I went to humanities. I saw it as an opportunity to gain a “general background” which wouldn’t limit me from going in any direction and doing whatever later (my reasoning was that after learning to be e.g. a doctor (or learning anything “real”) it’s very hard to change it later, but studying philology is basically enjoying reading (as I thought (I still almost cannot read fiction: was too much )), so I could stay “free” to move wherever afterwards, when I know better what do I want to do in life).

All in all, for four years I had A LOT of literature, morphology, phonetics, literary theory, specialised narrow courses like “Cyberpank in American Literature” or “Don Quihote in the World Culture”. Also some comparative studies, some semiotics, some culture, some ethics…a bunch of humanities stuff as you see.

Masters in management

After four years I figured that enough is enough, learned some new stuff and jumped into a Management masters program. It was about managing educational institutions, so there was A LOT of pedagogy, psychology and some management. But, lucky I am, there were also some data-related courses! Dealing with SPSS and learning the caveats and pecularities of working with social sciences data was SO COOL! That’s when I added one of the first mental check-marks that some day I want to work with data. ✔️

First “real” job

Dumb excel tables to calculate totally random performance metrics (which I mentioned at the beginning) lead to adding the next mental checkmark. ✔️ I enjoyed so much manipulating the data, color-coding the table, coming up with new things to calculate, building graphs, analyzing trends, trying to interpret the data and make sense of it! There were a lot of unknowns of course, and I had bumped into the kind of problems that you don’t even know how to google or what to ask. It was experimentation, trial and error and it wasn’t very efficient for learning or deeper understanding of the matter (since I blindly searched for the path).

Switch to IT

After a while I knew that I want to do something more technical, to be a part of some cutting-edge technology, so after some learning I became a first QA in a fast-growing cybersecurity startup. I did all kinds of things there, including analyzing the quality of testing and performance of QA team at a bit later stage, when there was a QA team already. That was another checkmark to working with data. ✔️ Somewhere at that point GPT-3 emerged, and the AI hype became insane. So, I decided that I want to be at the cutting edge of the cutting edge: in the AI 😉

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