From Finance to Data Science/Analytics: The Transition
Updated: Aug 7, 2020
While working as a Financial Data Analyst at Netflix and spending hours watching my excel slowly process 1 million rows and barely connecting to another sheet with just as many rows, my programmable mind couldn't stop thinking of how easy it would be if I processed all this data using some more efficient tool or program like I had seen our data science & engineers peers do as they helped us with data sets we couldn't manage . Exactly on that thought I realized it was time for me to graduate from Excel. So I started reaching out to those teammates at work I admired who I'd seen use Big data and whom made it look so much fun to me. I asked them how I could learn, and so many of them very generously offered to mentor me and guide me into becoming a Big Data user like themselves. It was absolutely thrilled to see how I saved myself hours of playing stare games with excel by automating so many of my manual tasks and just like that I had said goodbye to the days of watching my excel impatiently. I got addicted and wanted to program everything, and by then it was time to also say Goodbye to being a Financial Data Analyst at Netflix. Thanks to the finance projects I transformed into data science/analytics projects while at Netflix as well as some serious networking, I was able to eventually get a role in the BI/Data Science team at a peer to peer luxury marketplace Startup where I am now living my best life doing work I enjoy 100% of the time.
Co-founder, Cindy