From Pharmacy to Data Science: All the cool things about career transition
Tonight, I’m annotating a dataset for custom-named entity recognition(ner) and the range of my person, has come in handy for an excellent outcome. My background in Pharmacy is holding it down for the medical-related words, my natural language processing skills are coming just right in entity type and framework selection, machine learning for model training and programming came through in data curation, manipulation, and file management.
If you are reading this, you’re probably expecting a road map on how to ‘switch’ to data science but that’s not what I’ll like to share. So read the first paragraph again, that’s how career ‘switching’ plays out, your day to day activities may change but you never ‘ leave’, you ‘become’.
I subscribe to the philosophy of Enjoying where you are on the way to where you are going. So, I have enjoyed every phase of my career, from being a Clinical Pharmacist to the few months posting as a Community and Industrial Pharmacist and I’m having a great time doing Data Science.
So about the cool things in switching careers, I prefer to call it increasing your range, mastered knowledge doesn’t just go away.
- Domain Knowledge.
Like I wrote in the first paragraph, I’m annotating a dataset that has medical instances, data annotation is stressful but I love that I can participate in the decision making, I know exactly what I am labelling, what Natural Language Processing tools to use, consequences of low-quality labels and badly formatted data.
You are not ‘discarding’ previous knowledge, you are learning better and more useful ways to solve problems, so do it for the range!!!
2. Exciting Concepts and New Conversations.
Yes, there is fun stuff in every field. So many things to geek about.
Many reasons to have more respect for other fields and how they think about solutions.
The concept of Virtual Machines in computing isn’t far from making microbiological cultures. They are both environmental simulations.
Of course, no field is always exciting, there are always the monotonous stuff which you must master if you’ll be great at it.
One of my favourite things about Data Science, AI and tech stuff is the global platform and accessibility, If I’m taking a course on Coursera, that’s what everyone in the world is learning, if a new paper or framework is released about a concept, I can try that out the codes, models the same day as everyone else, I mean you even get to relate with innovators of ideas on social media
3. Resilience.
I didn’t die in Pharmacy School when we were studying Pharmacognosy, learning chemical structures and synthesizing stuff in the lab, so no code can ‘keh’ me.
So let’s just say I came in prepared. It’s easier to experiments on computers though, you can’t experiment with human lives the way you run codes.
If you want to explore other fields, do it!!.
Do it for the range, Do it for the geeking, Do it for the bag and if you fail at it, you still have your first profession so, what do you say?
So how do you get started? get googling, the internet is amazing!!!!! and exploring it the right way will change your life.
I should go to bed, Lagos has been stressful
