How to choose a career — and not stick with it!

The Genesis of this blog

I am super excited to start this writing journey as it’s one of my personal goals for 2021 to write more technical blogs and opinion pieces and share it here.

I wanted to start with a small article around personal development and career choices. I am a perfect example of someone who spent a lot of time searching for ‘the’ job, I am none the wiser for it but I had my fair deal of introspection, and most of all : I apply the “no regrets” rule 🙂

It’s pretty simple actually : If I go with a choice and think too much of the other one to the point of regret, that’s what I choose instead. or I think about head and tails and if I am biased towards one output, that’s when I know haha (of course it’s also contingent with other factors like ‘how rare’ this opportunity is, what this opportunity will bring me etc. The “no regrets” rule is still a big deciding factor)

As all of you may have experienced it, the current pandemic made lots of people rethink their lives and choices. To be honest, I was already a pretty anxious person, and I tended to reflect too much and feel like the world issues are crushing me while feeling useless and petty in comparison, so I learned how to better deal with it.

So to start from the beginning and speak more about my background:

I’ve always loved science and literature. I am an avid fiction reader and loved getting lost in imaginary worlds. Furthermore, I’ve always been pretty committed at school because, in my eyes, it was a gateway for a good future.

At first, I wanted to be a journalist or a writer, but I was soon becoming more and more practical and driven towards engineering. This wasn’t a job I truly envisioned as what I learned it to be now but in my mind it was the perfect definition of creating, putting something useful out in the world, something that was your idea.

I also wanted to keep all the doors open in terms of jobs. that’s why I followed the French school system (as I am from France) and took the widest (in terms of content and depth of courses), and most elitist training linked to Hard Sciences (Here’s a Wikipedia link : Happy 20th Birthday to Wikipedia !, it’s a quite controversial system still, but the landscape is changing in France regarding education and higher education entry as now there are more diverse ways to get into business/engineering schools).

I learned to manage my stress (especially during these intensive studies) by using my own method which is basically “relativize fast”, putting things that stress me out in perspective and detaching myself from it (side effect : resting “blasé” face 😂). It works quite well for me as I made it through the two years scientific prep school in one piece ! although my morale and confidence may have been shaken. Prep school can be brutal because that’s when you can really see and experience that being the best in your high school, doesn’t translate to performing as well especially in competition with the best students in the country (There definitely was a competitive spirit there although I made good friends, being quite flawed — like many education systems — the French school system was putting emphasis on grades instead of critical thinking and making children grow in their own best self … that’s an article for another time as I now value growth mindset and soft skills a lot more, learning how to learn is a good start.), I also could see from myself the inequalities between students that come from privileged backgrounds (and schools) and the others.

The big change in terms of my learning was that I learned mathematical rigor there, honestly people that don’t go to prep school miss out on so much in this area. I learned lots, and I really learned how to see maths past the cooking formulas learned in high school. that was a changing and enriching experience that I only retained the good memories from (My brain is wired that way, guess it makes one more resilient on the plus side).

At the end of it though, after having passed my exams for entry into engineering schools, I chose to go to my first choice, a small school which specialized in Computer Science and Mathematics. Although I didn’t take any courses in Computer Science previously apart from one or two labs (with Maple and OCamL).

I chose to get into uncharted territory for several reasons at the time:

• We are living in an era of technology, people who are building tech products are kind of shaping up people’s lives too. Even more so with ML algorithms …
• Computer Science can be applied to many fields, so I saw that as a means to later on be involved in projects around healthcare, physics, entertainment, whichever domain I wanted ! That’s incredible.
• I have been on the computer since a young age. This was my window to the world (series, games, forums, wikipedia) so I felt I would be comfortable at a desk job with a computer, and the possibility to work from anywhere and travel the world sounded appealing too !
• I was starting to hate physics… My focus was in physics before that, and I couldn’t picture myself becoming an astrophysics researcher (staying focused on researching one problem for many years seemed daunting for me), nor a physics engineer, the job certainly has changed from before too as lots of materials are outsourced, the real day-to-day job of an engineer wasn’t the same as before, I figured…
• I wanted to learn to code cool things and meet like-minded people that are a bit geeky too :D

So here I come at this school (we get a Master’s at the end of three years of school, taking into account the previous education) where the majority of people already were programming, let me tell you, the transition was brutal. I didn’t feel I was happy with CS job prospects (typical software engineering roles) up until I found about Data Science and chose my options in school accordingly. I was really happy to have found these new applications of both coding and mathematical skills, indeed machine learning is possible because we can store and process more data than ever, and the field is evolving every day. It’s fascinating for a curious mind to be involved in this community with ever-changing tools, methodologies and technologies to grasp. It also was really close to my personal interests with General Intelligence and anticipation novels. I think I also wanted to get into the field because I am deeply concerned about the advances in the field and how to best use these new algorithms.

Anyhow, that brings me to my point. I was curious enough to always question where I am at and where I am headed. Although it can, at times, make you unnecessarily restless, at that point in life where most of the students are just strolling away in their studies, I think it really helped me to stay focused on a specific goal to attain (and thinking about the job market — in the end we all have different backgrounds in terms of education but end up in the same job market, so I saw it as an even field with opportunities to take) and today I can say that I feel happy with the way things turned out.

Although I had some regrets over turning one internship down over another, not having been in another curriculum from the start, I am taking the strengths from my background and combining it with my current interests in order to progress. Especially since combining Data Science skills with another field (Physics, Neuroscience, Biology) is the best !

That’s also why in the end I tried out different jobs (the common theme was that I was processing data or/and developing AI components), different job titles I embraced over the years were : AI Software Engineer, Big Data developer, ML Engineer and finally Data Scientist (full-stack and ML Engineering flavor still). The important thing is to be close to data, so even if your first job is data analyst, data engineer, or even a researcher having at some point to analyze data, you may evolve to data science with work and finding the right opportunity next. I also think it’s not necessarily the destination that matters or will give you satisfaction, but the journey and accomplishments you can reflect upon 🙂

I still try to stay curious and up-to-date and always happy to strike a conversation with people from other fields because it can bring one so much and that’s also what can make you switch careers (or discover new possibilities) more easily.

Today’s world is also asking for people to become more and more adaptable to change and jobs are changing in a way that one has to expand skills over time so that’s why personal growth and continuous learning is important in my eyes, thus choosing a career is in fact presumptuous, I find that jobs can change and one can embrace many roles in a life, something I didn’t quite get when I lived in France where one gets a label for life ^^

I am really glad to have moved to Montreal two years ago in that sense, because it helped me discover a city (country ?) where going back to school and learning new things isn’t considered abnormal, I also love the creative vibe here.

So this was a long article and blogging is pretty new to me. I will expand on my list of goals for this year and what is currently of interest to me in AI in another article.

What about you ? How did you come to your current job and what do you want to explore now ?

Feel free to answer in comments or reach out on social media !

Originally published on January 24, 2021.