About six months ago, Eddie Kirkland was itching to make a change in his life.
At that point, he says, he’d taken “a really strange career path.” His degrees were in management and theology. His resume consisted of nonprofit work, quite a bit of time as a working musician, and most recently six years as the head priest at a church.
Back in college, Eddie remembered, he’d enjoyed his study of statistics. So he started looking into statistics-related careers. “Lo and behold,” he says, “[I found that] there’s this massive data science world that has opened up since I left.”
“As I started exploring it, I thought ‘I think I have enough of a foundation to kind of understand the concepts.’ There’s a lot of skills that I knew I needed. [But] even though my degree is in management and my graduate degree is in theology, I think I might actually be able to make a really cool path here with some online learning.”
He also knew that he had an unusual opportunity. Having taken a sabbatical, he had some time off from full-time work. “I thought to myself, I’m never going to have this chance again,” he says. “If I’m going to quit my job and change career paths, I need to know if this is really what I want.”
Diving Headfirst Into Data Science
When he started looking for the best data science MOOCs and online courses, “Dataquest came up as one of the top results.” But having no experience with programming, he still wasn’t sure how he’d feel about the programming-heavy curriculum.
“I basically went into it thinking okay, I’m going to try this and I’m just going to see,” he says. “It sounds fun, but it could be terrible, so let me try it and see if I still like it a month from now.”
And because Dataquest offers a lot of free content, trying it was easy. “I loved that there were a few free modules that kind of helped me get my feet wet,” Eddie says.
It wasn’t long after getting his feet wet that Eddie was diving in head-first. “Within the first month and a half I had purchased the full version and I was up ‘till 2 in the morning doing Python code and just loving it. Like absolutely loving it. Nobody is making me do it. It’s all on my own time, and I just really, really loved it.”
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