Free Essay on Discovering My Passion for Computers: A Journey of Struggle and Triumph

Many people face significant challenges in discovering their passion unless they are faced with a challenge in performing a specific task. My case in finding my passion for computers was nothing different but a result of many struggles to repair my computer. After a nearly full-committed day, I managed to format my hard disk, divide it, and install Microsoft Windows 98. Excitedly, I had just accomplished one of my greatest achievements in life. I had done what none of my friends had, as they usually purchased their computers with already installed operating software. Being just 17 years old, I held myself high and proud of such accomplishments. Within not much time, my passion had extensively grown as I could assist others in connecting to the internet using the 56k dial-up modems. As a result, I opted to pursue a computer science program, specifically data science, because I felt that it would offer me the fulfillment of connecting my interests in my career and private life.

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With the emergence of social media, my interest grew further as I found it fascinating how people would freely express their viewpoints on diverse topics without limitations associated with being censored. Accordingly, it became a hobby to study internet sources, follow trends, and identify the impacts of social media and its role in influencing modern society. With time, I could clearly identify the impact of social networks in changing the perception of life between my parent's generation and the digital generation. Social media influence ranges from the way we think to our behavior as well as decision making even in political issues. With my increased knowledge, I gained interest in playing a part in the movement of exploring people's opinions and how to reflect them to the public to provide society with a way of expressing itself clearly and freely.

My first ever experience in studying data was in a project on an EDX platform that I undertook in my initial course in a Micro Master Program at the University of San Diego. I managed to successfully examine a data set relating to the job market in the City of New York from Kaggie's website. The project majorly focused on IT-related jobs, and wage ranges, and it required that I develop a simple support vector machine (SVM) classifier to categorize jobs relating to their salaries. The project utilized text mining methods, specifically tokenization, to determine the most demanded skills. Besides, I also examined the top twenty trends of New York City on Twitter to establish how regularly the media is used in the job market.

Due to financial challenges, I had to acquire my very first full-time job while at university. However, I did not get the job that I wanted because the education system in my country could not adequately prepare students for the job market. After many years of hard work, I was finally able to get a job in Germany as a result of my improved skills in analytical thinking and problem-solving. According to the job contract, I was required to migrate to Germany as a skilled information technology (IT) worker, based on the team of Big Data Infrastructure. The company is the largest web-hosting company in Europe, as well as the first mail provider in the country. My tasks alongside my team involved providing clusters of data for data scientists. Through working with huge data sets and applications of streaming data such as Apache Kafka, Spark, and Hadoop frameworks for processing and distributed storage of big data, I was empowered with a significant insight relating to the role and importance of data evaluation. However, due to my passion and specialization, I am planning to shift to the data science team from 1st December, where I will be focused on analyzing the behavior of website users hosted by the company to send targeted advertisements.

In addition, I enrolled in a micro master's program in the data science program through the EDX platform offered by the University of San Diego, which has dramatically improved my skills in data evaluation. The program is comprised of four courses, including data science Python, data science probability and statistics using Python, fundamentals of machine learning, and analytics of big data using Spark. Currently, I have completed the first three courses but still pursuing the last one. These courses have played a fundamental role in preparing me for my master’s program, considering their significant emphasis on concepts of mathematics and calculus, machine learning fundamentals, concepts of optimization, fundamentals of deep learning, classification of algorithms, and various types of regression, which are critical in data sciences. Since assignments and projects were submitted through Python, my proficiency in Python programming language improved tremendously. Besides, I also improved in online training and learned how it is different from on-campus and how to mitigate the challenges involved in both.

Moreover, I am aiming to pursue a master's of data science at the University of Texas, Austin, due to my low experience and knowledge of data science. Undertaking the course will enable me to improve my knowledge in this domain significantly. The course is also essential for my career development as a data scientist in my future endeavors. I would also wish to leverage my knowledge to design and develop intelligent systems with cognitive abilities that have a greater impact on society. Such will form my primary reasons as to why I would like to undertake my master's in data science at the University of Texas, Austin. Furthermore, with my increased interest in social media, I would like to engage in the development of meaningful insights from the activities of social media users to expound on their primary concerns, more so for the nations with limited freedom of the media.

I am fully determined to succeed in my program on data sciences as it has a significant influence on the success of both my career and private life goals as well as render a great social effect. Through continuous development, I have transformed my attitude, abilities, and goals over the years, and I am better informed than I was 13 years ago while I was still an undergraduate. My perception of academics has also tremendously transformed as I can now relate its importance and how it could improve my professional success. I hope that the admission committee will consider my application favorably, considering my unwavering efforts and dedication across the trials and turmoils on my educational and professional journey, and offer me an opportunity to pursue my future at the prestigious University of Texas.