My name is Kushagra. I am in the data analytics industry working as a senior data analyst. Having had been a data analyst for approximately 4 years prior to the mentorship, I felt that a data scientist position would be the natural progression for my career, and I felt that I really struggled with creating a well balanced learning plan that invovled theory and practice to further my qualifications and skillset. So I reached out to Dataship and started my mentorship journey with the goal of working on an end to end data science project to boost my skills and then land a job in data science.

Over the course of our mentorship, going through all of our modules and understanding how to build habits and create project roadmaps among other things, I think one of the most important things that I learned was actually to self-reflect. Dataship became not only a data science mentor but a life coach for me. I began to realize that the goals which I need to create should be based on the type of life I want to have, who I want to be as a person. I began to let myself open up and work on improving myself from an emotional and mental perspective, which was just as important as me wanting to be a data scientist. Reflecting upon these things I realized how important it was to have self-confidence, as it was always my own self-doubt that got in the way of me feeling like I'm good enough to get a certain job.

We used frameworks that invovled breaking down my life into 12 separate areas, such as self, body, finance, time, etc. and then reflecting on them to give each a rating. Upon rating each one, I would identify ones that required the most work and begin building out systems to improve the ratings of these areas over time. This has really helped me identify how to work on what is urgent and important on a daily basis. All while doing this, I also managed to complete my mentorship project in Natural Language Processing of Twitter data, bolstering my portfolio.

Due to having more mental clarity, I realized that the most important thing wasn't for me to jump into a data science position necessarily, as I felt fulfilled doing what I do as a data analyst. I came to realize that my current company actually checks off a majority of the boxes that I would have in a must-have list of employers, an exercise which I did with Dataship. Knowing this, I realized I can improve as a data scientist within the company as well, now being more involved in ML projects. I realized that my thought process was too focused on the destination rather than the process, the destination being a data scientist, meanwhile not realizing that beginning to take actions that align with being a data scientist in the present will be what actually makes you a data scientist regardless of what your job title says.

Today I am much more confident in who I am and what I can achieve, I know that I am already a data scientist and it is something I work on every single day. I define what success means to me, I define what my rich life looks like. This is all thanks to Dataship.