Women in Big Data Global

Donate
×

Blogs

WiBD Helped Me Land My Job

Women in Big Data

By Ekaterina Tcareva,

July 31, 2017

ekaterina

I’ve just got my first job in the Machine Learning field, and here’s a big “THANK YOU” to WiBD for helping me during my career transition.

About five years ago I moved to California from Russia with my husband and my two-year-old son. Inspired by the Silicon Valley vibe, I decided to get my Bachelor Science in Computer Science.

In Russia I had worked as an Education Support Specialist for a university, where part of my job was to analyze student performance data, so I was already interested in Data Science and Data Analytics. I took related classes at University of California, Santa Cruz, as well as some on-line classes, and participated in all the WiBD workshops that I could fit in my very busy mom-wife-student schedule. “Machine Learning with Python and Scikit-Learn”, “Just Enough Python,” hosted by Cloudera, and a meetup on Apache Spark at MapR were most helpful and relevant for my job and job search.

I graduated in March 2017 and started looking for an entry level job in Machine Learning, Data Science, or Data Processing. With no “real world” experience (just academic projects), I was having a hard time during interviews. Then, in May, I participated in “How to Interview So That They Hire You” Meet Up with career coach Bob Loftis. Bob helped me understand how I could explain my lack of experience, and how I could talk about my academic projects. It was exactly what I needed to have more confidence in myself and my abilities.

The following week, a friend I had met at WiBD told me about a career fair for women in tech. There I talked with a very nice person from Stanford University, explaining my projects (just as Bob taught me!). The result: I landed a great internship at Stanford in their SLAC National Accelerator Lab, where I’m working on a picture classification problem using unsupervised learning. The position is exactly what I wanted, and I love it!

Thank you again, WiBD, for your support and your very useful workshops!!!

And thank you, Bob Loftis,  for your advice!

 

Click here to learn more about Bob.

Click here to visit Ekaterina’s LinkedIn page.