Interview with Data Science alumnus, Seth Dow

"Hi, my name is Seth Dow and before I joined SIT Academy I was working as a math teacher for 15 to 18-year-olds. I was teaching Statistics, Calculus, Algebra, and Geometry at a pretty low level compared to what might be expected from a Data Scientist.
 

I wanted to change careers, so I did a lot of reading in the Data Science field, and I eventually just got convinced that this was possible. I had also read specifically about teachers who became Data Scientists and that motivated me to take part in the bootcamp. I knew back then that it would take a lot of work since I know how skill-building goes being a teacher. The thing that I needed was to believe that I could do it."
 

"I liked the general setup and the daily structure - you spend the morning with lectures and do your exercises in the afternoon, supported of course. Constructor Academy tended to have really good teachers! Some of them taught me things that I think would have taken me many months or years to learn. The thing with different teachers from industry is also that you get a sense of the type of people that are in the profession and how they view the tasks themselves, whether they think they're hard or easy, or kind of the care that they take with them and the approach that they have. You may not identify with every single teacher that is within the curriculum, but you will identify with one, two, or three of them and think: “oh, I could see myself becoming this person. I could see myself having the skill level that this person has and being able to perform at the level that would be required to have their job!”

Everything is out there - but what you all do is you give the human connection to everything, and you create the motivation to do everything and give everything a context!"