Growing up, never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that I would be making a living making YouTube videos. Of course YouTube only gained widespread popularity once I was graduating high school, but even then, I thought I would go into a normal career path, being either a banker, accountant, or lawyer. A career path that would be palatable for my parents. Because of that, even though I had an interest in computers and computer science, I decided to study finance in college, choosing a major in my parents interests and not my own.
Soon after I graduated college and started work as an analyst, a couple of my friends had decided to start a YouTube channel. Their channel grew extremely quickly and wanting to expand, they asked me if I would like to help them work on their channel. The thought of working with friends and creating something together intrigued me and so I quit my job and started working on the YouTube channel full time.
The past 5 years working and growing the YouTube channel has taught me many invaluable lessons about teamwork and compromise, sacrificing many nights working towards a common goal with my friends. I feel I’ve learned all I can from working on the YouTube channel and now I want to finally pursue my interest in computer science. Having already studied mathematics and statistics for my finance classes in college, data science seems like the perfect fit for me to learn computer science while also being able to apply the knowledge I’ve gained in the past. I can’t wait to embark on this journey and am excited to see the doors that learning data science will open for me.