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When I reflect on my journey into data science it feels like a mix of 60% luck mixed with 10% chaos and 30% obsession.I’m not sure where to start on the time estimate, if I started with me finally abandoning Matlab and ramping on python it would be 5 years ago. If I started with the hedge fund it would be 7 years ago. If I started with genetic algorithms and computer vision it would be 15 years ago. If I started with me following in love with math it would be 18 years ago.So maybe I’ll go way back and bring it back to the present.18 years ago:I hated math until I took AP Calculus in high-school, it flipped a switch in me. I LOVED it, I became obsessed with it. I was #1 in the class all year, my friends hated me for it, and the teacher loved my passion on the topic. This happened twice, where I took an hour long exam, and hours later I would suddenly realize I had made a specific mistake in part of an answer on the exam. This was weird, it wasn’t me pondering or reviewing the exam, it was like it would just jolt my brain out of nowhere: “you made a mistake on 7.B on the final derivation!”. Once this happened in my sleep, very weird. Both cases, I told the teacher and she verified it was correct, and gave me full credit since she hadn’t graded the exams yet. Like someone would sketch for fun, I would come up with new fantasy coordinate systems and derive ideas around it on a large piece of paper. I remember asking my teacher advanced calculus questions she didn’t know the answer to, so I had to go to a local college and ask a college level math tutor. I would do math for fun on the weekend, deriving new theoretical coordinate systems and puzzling over how they would behave. If you asked me at the time I probably felt like an exceptional math savant. So obviously in college I thought math should be a big part of my journey.15 years ago:I chaotically drifted majors from math, to biological engineering, and switched schools to UNR in Reno, NV and settled on chemical engineering with an emphasis on biomedical engineering. It was one of the majors that allowed me to satisfy all of the pre-medical classes (1yr biology, 2 yrs of chemistry) while still giving me decent exposure to math.Chemical engineers had one basic programing class called numerical methods. I remember my teacher having black finger nails and wearing all black head to toe. He was a goth. He introduced us to programming some basic linear algebra and some hill climbing optimizations routines. Just like falling in love with math, the thing that made me fall in love with programming was when he taught us genetic algorithms and simulated annealing. I was blown away. I started to become obsessed with the idea of my computer doing work for me while I was at school or working. From that point on I included some programming or computer vision (self-taught) application into all of my engineering projects.I lived in the woods:Oh, I forgot to mention, this is kind of embarrassing, but it lead to some random decisions later so I’ll share it. My second and third year while taking 19 credits of engineering I decided I wanted to live in the woods in the snow instead full time instead of getting an apartment. This made a news splash nationally and I ended up doing ~5 radio morning shows, ~7 news[1] paper[2] articles[3], and 2 local TV specials. Here is one of the first TV specials:I was obsessed with starting an outdoor company after that experience. Originally, I thought I wanted to start an outdoor equipment company. I had a lot of feedback and experience now after using gear for 180days in some harsh conditions (coldest night I slept outside was -15F). Instead, I settled on an e-commerce company selling climbing gear.E-commerce:I had no idea what I was doing, but I had written a few lines of code and knew some basic html. So I jumped into the PHP/MySQL mix and learned how to program while studying chemical engineering. This was before the easy days of the cloud and e-commerce software companies. Integrating my credit card payment system was very complicated, it took several weeks. I had to manage every element of the backend manually, it was a pain. I also, often got in over my head on some of the more advanced code changes. I got sick of paying kids $50 on campus to fix some of my bugs I had caused, eventually I stopped having to do that. I ended up shipping rock climbing product all of the world. I remember sending climbing gear to Italy, South Korea, Malaysia, Argentina, Mexico, and the middle east.Desert Research Institute:To satisfy my bug for high performance computing I took a summer internship position for the Desert Research Institute combining multiple satellite datasets to build maps of algae concentration in Antarctic sea ice. These simulations took a long time, I remember them running for 4–5 days just to process all of the images. I also remember some of my ChE professors grumbling that this wasn’t a “real” chemical engineering internship.I wrapped up my ChE bachelor receiving the Outstanding Senior award for the department. I didn’t have the highest grades, but I had been the student body president for the department and I had a lot of passion to learn things outside of the curriculum.I accepted a masters in Chemical Engineering opportunity at the University of Utah and continued my image processing stream with SEM images of gold nano-particle arrays. I also spent a lot of my time programming light scattering simulations.Intel/Micron (IMFLASH):I worked for Intel/Micron for 4 years in metrology, photolithography, and then process control. Most of the engineers I worked with couldn’t program very well, so I was always looking for opportunities to automate different types of analysis. One of the projects I worked on focused on automating some excursion analysis that was very time consuming for engineers.7 years ago - Hedge Fund:Still obsessed with HPC I had been playing with GPU computing before the world knew what deep-learning was. I had purchased a huge GPU and I built a gaming computer to do side projects on. Most of those projects dealt with biologically inspired optimizers (metaheurstics), image processing, and distributed computing. Girish, a coworker of mine at IMFLASH told me he had just seen a job opening at a hedge fund looking for an AI/GPU expert. I applied and got the job and began building out scripts to do distributed feature generation across 600 GPUs on hundreds of nodes. We where predicting long/short stock portfolios for the SP1500, mostly driven by sentiment coming from the news on particular stocks. I was able to get our entire 5 year back test to run 100% on the GPU without talking to the CPU at all. We worked with some really bright people like James Malcolm and the folks at Arrayfire. Since that experience, I have felt like quants (quantitative analysts), were data scientists before data science was a thing. Quants were great programmers, knew math inside and out, and made huge salaries ($700K+ in Manhattan for the truly exceptional).Time? The amount of time I was putting into the hedge fund wasn’t healthy. I was driving to work in the dark and watching the sunset, my wife wasn’t happy. I left the hedge fund and to scratch the distributed storage/compute itch my wife let me build out a brand new 10 node linux cluster in our home to dev on.HireVue:I actually went back to IMFLASH for one year and was really forced to quit because of the market difference in pay for data scientists. At the time Intel/Micron had no way to compensate data scientists differently than engineers and they were starting to lose some. Shortly after I left they figured out the data science pay, I’d like to think I had a role in that by ruffling some feathers. So for those data scientists that stayed, you’re welcome.I left IMFLASH to join an HR startup called HireVue as their first data science hire. I had 0 interest in joining an HR company, but after finding out they were getting a $20M round from Sequoia I was intrigued. I helped build out a data science team and we were able to ship an AI product called HireVue insights. I left HireVue a year and a half ago to found my own deep-learning startup with David Gonzalez called Ziff.ai.Through all of this I had a steady passion to learn new things. The amount of time I’ve invested is excessive, I think most people are smarter than me and don’t need to invest as much as I do. I wrote a blog post where I felt like someone could become competitive in the market with 6 months of hard work:From 0 to $100K+ data science job in 6 monthsI’m curious what common themes, if any, people see in this chaotic journey I have had into data science.Here is a talk I gave last year at DSGO2017 that covers some elements of this journey:Footnotes[1] Homeless: USU student ditches rent, lives in tent - The Daily Universe[2] Homeless and happy about it - The Utah Statesman[3] Tent still 'home' for USU student

How do you think it feels to go from never really having to worry about money to about $30 to your name?Actually, if you include my student and personal loan balances, I technically had a net worth of about -$43,000 at the time.Let me start my story with when I was little.Myself, my dad and my mom were all upper middle class, living in rural-suburban Connecticut. In the spring of 1994, when I was two going on three, we moved into a 3,000 sq ft. half colonial, half McMansion new construction. My father was working as an engineer for a large telecom company and was one of their rising stars while my mother was a tenured teacher at a high school in a town next door. I don’t have exact numbers since I was a kid at the time but as a family we were more than likely pulling in $200,000/year in 2018 inflation-adjusted dollars, perhaps a little more than that.Both of my parents came from lower class backgrounds so they had really inverted their fortunes. My father was born into a dirt poor half Italian half Lithuanian laborer family and was one of six siblings. My mother, although one of only three siblings, didn’t fare much better in her younger years. Only by going to college did each of them dig their way out of the lower class and a likely “life sentence” of menial jobs with poor pay.To both of my parents, they had struck it rich in their middle life. A big, brand new house in the suburbs, one child already with the possibility to expand our family, two vehicles, even pets, they really had it made by their earlier standards!We hosted all sorts of gatherings for friends and family alike. Christmas parties with family, birthday parties for my dad’s many uncles, you name it. For my fifth birthday a neighbor who owned and operated a farm within walking distance brought over a pony and gave me and “my” guests pony rides in our back yard. At some point (I forget exactly when) we had a 24 foot swimming pool installed in our side yard, between our large front and back yards. We took vacations every year without fail, most notably with all of my dad’s siblings and their own families to our annual Cape Cod reunion. Sometimes we also visited more unique locations including Marco Island in Florida and Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. Day trips or weekend getaways to Martha’s Vineyard or Block Island happened every now and then.Life was good.I’ll cut through a lot of the subsequent years as a lot of it isn’t really relevant to this story. The short version of it all is the dot-com bubble burst, my dad freaked out, my parents divorced because of money and each remarried, however each with a lower living standard than before their split. The house was sold shortly after the divorce so none of us live there currently.Fast forward to summer 2014. I remember it all like it was yesterday.I had just graduated from Northeastern University in May and continued to live in the Boston area as I desperately searched for a job in the pharma/biotech field. I had been job searching the entire time since graduation. Although I had great internship experience, almost no one wanted some scrub with a Bachelor’s degree in biology who had next to no experience.I literally had no source of my own income. My father offered me a very generous monthly loan which covered my rent and which left me with about $20 left over each day. I was living with a ragtag couple of roommates, neither of whom I got along with nearly as well as the ones with which I had lived previously, in a very poorly kept apartment in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood.It was a pretty pathetic existence honestly.Between the costs of job interviews (none of which I was compensated for, mind you) and things like coin-op laundry, it seems like the loan amount from my dad wasn’t enough and I had to dip into what meager savings I had from college jobs.Around the same time, my dad was - naturally - starting to get sick of lending me out money. His rationalization was that by lending me money, I was able to kind of coast by while not being 100% serious about my job search. His threats had some effect as I started getting more desperate for open positions and I even starting reaching out to some staffing agencies which I had heard poor things about. Mind you, I was well connected with the reputable staffing agencies by this time and was engaged in active job hunts with quite a few of them.I really can’t describe how much I was cutting every last expense I could. I was cutting my own hair, never ever taking taxis to get anywhere, to get my mind off my trash situation every now and then I was playing Skyrim on my old Xbox 360 (the game was at least three years old at the time), so on and so on.In late August, just after my birthday of all times, I was really getting stretched thin. I checked my bank account to see how much money I had left.I had exactly $34.68 to my name in my Bank of America account.I remember thinking to myself “Welp, that’s it. $34.68. That’s one last grocery store run of stocking up on 50 cent frozen burritos, maybe some cheap meat, some rice, just enough for a week or two. I’m already stretching my food as far as I can realistically go without starving myself. Actually, I’m down 20 pounds from the weight I should be. Hopefully I have some more fat reserves left to go?”That was a really humbling realization to make.I had come a long way down and, at the time, there was no end in sight. I honestly considered what I would have to do if my bank balance actually hit $0 and if I was unable to pay my rent. I started looking up resources in the greater Boston area which I could turn to if it really got that bad. Essentially, I was using what might be my last remaining time as a part of “regular” society to prepare for what would happen if I became homeless.Thankfully, I was able to convince my dad to make one more loan payment to keep me afloat. Not long thereafter I got an interview which led to a job. It paid piss poorly but it was something.So what did that whole journey feel like? Honestly, I really don’t have words for it. Terms like disgusted, frustrated, feeling like a failure, mad at the system and many more all come to mind. There’s really no describing your emotions during a time like that. You’re certainly sad and anxious, perhaps even depressed, but comparing it back to what you once had? There’s really no term to describe that wave of emotions. “A living nightmare” perhaps comes close.As a post script, I thankfully emerged from that rut without having to go homeless. I eventually got a job in my field and then used that job to get another job and so on. I learned so much about budgeting and cost cutting during my money crunch that I still apply many of those lessons today; in fact, I even largely attribute the upcoming full repayment of all my loans to that trial by fire in finances. Going through something like that really makes you understand exactly what you need and what you don’t need. Sure, I have a lot more things in my life now that I don’t truly need but they help improve the quality of my life, therefore I choose to make the expenditure on them. This includes things like Uber pool trips if I need to get somewhere faster than public transit can get me there and so on.Finally, allow me to offer this piece of advice: for those who have a potential “light at the end of the tunnel” for their junk financial situation, you will come out so much stronger at the end of it all! We all absolutely learn from our past and there is perhaps no better way than to learn by actually going through something for yourself. Think of all the ways you’ve managed to save money and realize that should you happen upon a better overall financial situation, you’ll be very likely to apply some of those lessons later on. As a perfect example, I still occasionally cut my own hair (not applicable to everyone of course) and I live in housing which is much cheaper than what I “should” be paying according to society’s standards. You will come away from this with similar takeaways! You may even be much better off for it as you eventually accumulate all those savings over time.Thanks for reading and best of luck to those of you still facing a rough situation!

I heard a lot of good advice here, but a lot of it hasn't applied to me (I only really know about Manhattan south of Harlem).If you want an apartment, put down the application fee right away (it was $75 for my last apartment) then finish your search. Risking the $75 was worth it when 10 minutes into filling out paperwork, someone tried to apply for the same apartment.If you're willing to spend $2500 and up, you won't have a problem finding a comfortable apartment in a good area of Manhattan. If you want to have some elbow room in that good area, consider $3000 and up. If you take away some comforts (laundry room, elevator, how far you need to go to get to mass transportation, etc), then you might be able to stay in the $2000-$2500 range.Time of year affects whether or not you have to pay broker's fees. (Talk to a broker in the area you're interested in and ask when you should consider moving.) Also, some apartments actually have much better deals than others. While I have seen the "first and last month's rent plus security deposit" type of deal with one apartment I looked at in the East Village, the apartment I moved into in the Financial District only required first month's rent and $1,000 security deposit. Much better.While we did find good deals going without a broker, maybe dealing with owners instead of leasing offices, you do end up having to deal with some of the stuff Davide mentioned, and getting turned down for the silliest reasons. One apartment in Murray Hill I loved. I had my fiancee rush down in a taxi, and she thought the same. I asked "Where do I sign?" and suddenly he mentioned he promised the apartment to someone else. Eventually he called back saying that fell through, so I showed up again, then he asked for more money. There was a bit more back and forth, (he wanted me to keep his furniture and toss mine, and some other silly things) ... I realized I didn't have the time to screw around anymore. Everyone who's looking for an apartment has a timeline anyway, so if you can't sign right away, don't bother. Leasing offices pre-checked by brokers let you sign right away. There are websites to help you find things on your own, but it was taking us much longer to find decent deals with the websites, and we found a great broker that showed us 10 good apartments all not requiring a broker's fee, all in the same day, and we signed for apartment #7 out of 10.If you talk to a broker and they're off their game in anyway, the disappointments will probably pile on, and you should just spend the rest of the day with a different broker.If you know you're going to have to move out at a certain time that doesn't necessarily agree with the end of your annual lease, you can ask the building manager/landlord about the possibility of a short term lease. These are few and far between in my experience, but one thing that does seem possible, including my building, is tacking on 1-3 months onto the end of a lease when it ends. I don't know why, but that's within policy.You may very well be disappointed with the size of the apartment. If you're looking in the Village, Soho, or any other ultra-trendy area, you may lose 100-200 square feet of space as opposed to the better value areas like Murray Hill, Yorkville, Stuyvesant Town, or parts of the Financial District.Don't go with any mover your broker recommends. The brokers we went with were great, and they have the best of intentions, but the movers they recommend were reliably utter crap. It's hard to find a trustworthy mover in general, but you can do better than that. I was most impressed with Big John's Moving ... they're frequently used for film productions. You can't be a dish dropper if you're going to be trusted with high precision equipment. They didn't pay me to say that.Parking's going to be a killer if you have a car. If it's a Smartcar, you may very well get half off... I know Icon Parking did that. Also, residents can get a significant discount on monthly parking if they live in the same building. There's also a form you fill out to get 8+% tax for parking waived if you're a resident. It's possible to do street side parking if you can work waiting for the street sweeper into your lifestyle.I do agree that non-rent-controlled apartments can and will go quickly up in price. Even if it seems like a good deal, be prepared to move in the next year or two if it's not rent-controlled. You can get an idea about how much the rent can go up because in the lease agreement (at least the ones I've signed), there was mention of what the "true value" of the apartment is considered to be, and you're agreeing that this is a "special deal"... my first lease called it a "sweetheart deal". Right...I have no problem mentioning the brokers I had success with...Jelena Koprivica of New York Living Solutions (found us a place in the Financial District)Noeleen McStay of Rutenberg (found us a place in Yorkville)