{"id":305,"date":"2019-03-13T11:34:20","date_gmt":"2019-03-13T15:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dev-notes.com\/blog\/?p=305"},"modified":"2019-03-13T11:54:49","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T15:54:49","slug":"redirecting-my-career-back-into-machine-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dev-notes.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/13\/redirecting-my-career-back-into-machine-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Redirecting My Career Back into Machine Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hi. I’m Janice. I am a software engineer. I quit my job this year to shift my career towards Machine Learning. My husband runs dev-notes<\/a>, and I plan to use it to chronicle my journey. I’m hoping this will also help keep myself accountable to my goal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My Background<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

So, why am I doing this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m not new to this field. I have a bachelor’s degree in computer science from 2002. I’ve been programming since I was in high school. I worked for nearly 8 years at IBM Research as a software engineer on speaker recognition, speech recognition, gender detection, keyword search, etc. You’d think this would be easy for me, right? Don’t I know what I need already?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not quite. (Or, maybe I lack the confidence?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I paused my career to start a family right around when the state of the art for these sorts of systems shifted from HMM-based models to neural networks. When I worked at IBM, I interacted daily with proprietary code and tools. While I know how to solve problems in general, I don’t have the confidence yet to find a job. I have no portfolio. All of my experience is dated and very specific. I need to address these shortcomings. Artificial intelligence has become so accessible these days that folks with less experience have already found their place. I’m confident that someone like me should<\/em> be able to do this. (Do I sound confident?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I decided to go back to work again after my career break, I had to relearn how to work with the constraints of having a young family. For me, this was a big deal. I timidly took roles at universities in hopes of maintaining a good work-life balance. However, I was doing primarily web development in Ruby on Rails with bits of python thrown in, and it wasn’t fulfilling. Looking back at my career, I was happiest when I was working on machine learning problems. I want to be back there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My Plan<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I just enrolled in the Udacity Machine Learning Nanodegree<\/a>, with a start date of April 16, 2019. The time commitment is 2 three-month terms for about 10 hours a week. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to complete the course in less time, but I’m a mom to two young kids. We’ll see how it goes. I chose Udacity because I do much better when there’s a structure to my learning. They stress that the course will help build my portfolio, which I’m sure will be useful once I start applying for jobs. This will cost me $999 for two terms, so basically $2k. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve already subscribed to a year of datacamp<\/a>, so I’m making my way through as many of those courses as I can. A year subscription cost me $180. I think it’s worth it so far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hope to at least try a Kaggle<\/a> competition. Even if I fail, it looks like a great way to get my hands dirty and learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, I plan to take the famous Coursera course with Andrew Ng. I hear that this is a great foundational course. I’ve only just started it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, thanks for reading. I plan to have regular updates in the coming months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi. I’m Janice. I am a software engineer. I quit my job this year to shift my career towards Machine Learning. My husband runs dev-notes, and I plan to use it to chronicle my journey. I’m hoping this will also help keep myself accountable to my goal. My Background So, why am I doing this? … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Redirecting My Career Back into Machine Learning”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[51,52,50,53],"class_list":["post-305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-udacity","tag-coursera","tag-datacamp","tag-machine-learning","tag-udacity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dev-notes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dev-notes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dev-notes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dev-notes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dev-notes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.dev-notes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317,"href":"https:\/\/www.dev-notes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions\/317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dev-notes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dev-notes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dev-notes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}