How I Transitioned from Analyst to Data Scientist in Less Than 12 Months | by Claudia Ng | Aug, 2024


Without a technical background or a PhD in mathematics

Towards Data Science
Image by fancycrave1 from Pixabay

My data science journey began with a crisis.

At 9:01am on Monday morning, my phone buzzed with a PagerDuty alert. Instinctively, I pulled up the company dashboard and saw that loan approval rates had doubled overnight.

My heart started pounding.

I was a risk analyst at the time managing a lending portfolio. Approving loans for a higher-risk segment could have a big impact on loss rate.

Bleary-eyed, I dove into the data.

I frantically:

  • Wrote SQL queries to pull data,
  • Analyzed data in Python trying to spot anomalies,
  • Looked for patterns that could explain the sudden spike in approval rates.

I discovered that one specific feature in the credit model had drifted.

Turns out it was a simple timezone error.

This incident marked a turning point in my career, and was the beginning of my journey going from data analyst to data scientist.

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