So I wound up in data science by accident really.

In my youth I was interested in computers. Specifically I was interested in video games and then I developed skills related to solving my problems around that hobby. Things like how to troubleshoot, upgrade, and eventually build PCs since it saves money and time. You can get back to gaming quicker or play better games.

I ended up making friends with other people with the same interests and it just kinda took off from there. I knew I wanted to work with computers originally to make video games. So I started learning to code for that and was not very successful teaching myself, though I did learn some basic scripting.

I had an interest in mathematics sort of developing at the same time. I liked that you could get objective answers rather than get graded on how someone feels about your work. My interest in math came slow and I wouldn't say I knew I wanted to do anything with it for quite awhile. However, it's part of the picture for later.

At any rate, when I hit college I really didn't know what I wanted to do. Everyone including the media at the time was discouraging me from pursuing video game development and the dot com bubble had just happened. It didn't seem like there was a future in CS necessarily, however computing was still around.

So what I did was implement a plan to sort of hedge my bets. I focused on an engineering degree for the job prospects and paycheck, but also took some CS courses to augment that. That wound up meaning, for efficiency's sake, I should focus on electrical or computer engineering. So that's what I did.

In the mean time I kept taking math. I had a series of excellent professors and was finding that I really enjoyed the topics presented. Engineering courses seemed somewhat shallow by comparison, though to be fair and in hindsight I just didn't take it far enough.

Back on track though, this experience opened my eyes to the idea that I could maybe do something with mathematics. I was getting exposed to some things in scientific computing and seeing that there were people working on problems in that domain. It would just require a grad degree out of me.

My professors also mentioned that mathematics majors can move on to do really anything, as they remain competitive for most entry level work. It's just if you want a job doing math all day you need the graduate education.

Well, at the end of my Sophomore year, I switched majors to applied math and have been doing that ever since. I graduated with a MS several years ago during the recession, which was shitty, but eventually I got a development job when companies started hiring again and transitioned over a couple years to data science which I've been doing for 3-4 years now.