Introduction

Hey there! My name is Jon, and you’re reading my first thought article. Like the name suggests, I named these as such because blog posts seem like they would be a little to much work. I wanted these to be a little more informal. Not quite stream of consciousness type writing, but not as rigid as a formal blog post.

I guess to begin, I should explain who I am, what this is, and why this is. Well, like I said, my name is Jon, and I am a Data Scientist working for a biotech company based in Washington State, USA. I started this site to be able to show case some cool projects I’ve been working on, as well as document my journey to my current position. I relied heavily on really helpful people along my journey to get where I am, only seems right to give back in this fashion.

I suspect that because this is my first post, it’s going to be considerably bad. The formatting will likely be boring (I’ve used markdown before, but I’m not an expert) and I may draw on, but may as well start somewhere.

Undergrad (2014 - 2019)

Fall of 2014 I began my academic career at the Unversity of California Irvine as a track and field athlete studying Biology. To be quite honest, I wanted nothing to do with Biology (at least at first) I wanted to be an Exercise Science major, but that was a specialization within Biology that you could only declare at the end of your 2nd year, so I just went with it. I had a huge culture shock my first year there. I didn’t know how to study at all, was intimidated by all the brilliant minds surrounding me, and finished my first year by the skin of my teeth (2.6 GPA). Thankfully, that wake up call was what I needed, and I not only excelled my 2nd year but began to appreciate the life sciences.

I still went with an Exercise Science specialization, and eventually went into coaching like I had initially planned, but there were a few things that were bothering my while I started my journey as a coach-

  1. Nepotism
    • I dont want to come off as complaining, but man, it was depressing knowing that landing a job was extremely dependent on who was on your resume.
  2. Know-it-all Culture
    • There are definitely coaches who were critical, discerning, and adequately conveyed their level of understanding of certain topics. However, the modus operandi of most coaches is to make it seem like they have all the answers, which gets tiring after a while.
  3. Infinite internships that lead to $12 an hour
    • Money isn’t everything, I’ll be the first to admit that. But while I was looking for my first job I had ~ 4 internships, a bachelors degree in Biology, and 4 years of collegiate athletics under my belt and was struggling to find a job that would pay me more than a $900 stipend per academic quarter (that is an actual quote).

Regardless of how I felt about the above short-comings, one thing I did enjoy was finding out ways to scale my business with regard to personal training and coaching. Becuase of the previously mentioned wages, I didn’t have much money to spend on a SaaS to manage my coaching clients (think of apps like Strong) but I still wanted a way to calculate load increases from week to week without having to manually look at an excel sheet. This is a non-trivial task in sport science because adjusting load from week to week depends on a lot of variables that don’t lend themselves well to measuring in an excel sheet (JuggernautAI does a great job at this).

The Pivot (2020 - 2022)

Eventually I realized a couple things:

  1. I’m struggling to make ends meet.
  2. My roommate (Software Engineer) was being flown out to San Francisco for a summer internship and making 8k a month while still in college.

It didn’t take long to put 2 and 2 together to realize I was in the wrong profession, with a long long road ahead of me. I wanted to make the switch, but Software Engineering/Data Science is a vast field with many specialties, niches, and software to learn. I didn’t know where to start or what to learn. Thankfully for me, I had a great background in Biology where I took Physics, Calculus, and many other technical classes that I could lean on. Also, there was an unoptional break that we were all forced to take circa March 2020 that gave me the time I needed to begin this long journey.

The summer of 2020 I started with a Udemy course on 🐍 Python 🐍 and started learning. To be quite honest I had no idea what I was doing, and I felt like I was going to suck forever. The first project was Tic Tac Toe in a Jupyter notebook and I failed horribly with it. Thankfully, I was about to begin a master’s program in Human Physiology where I would be able to apply 🐍 Python 🐍 to my research.

My master’s program is where I really was able to excel. I was able to work 🐍 Python 🐍 into my school work (even if it really didn’t make much sense) just so I could get more comfortable with it. I was able to take fundamental computer science classes like Intro CS, Data Structures and Algorithms, and bioinformatics, and I had a great mentor who had previous work in transcriptomics.

NOTE: If you aren’t familiar with transcriptomics, or bioinformatics as a whole, that’s cool. I’ll probably make another article going over my research, and the field as a whole.

Toward’s the end of my master’s degree, I was miles ahead of where I started, but still needed help landing my first role. That’s why I decided to join Pathrise as a Data Science mentee. There are varying opinions on services like Pathrise that have an income share agreement. Some think it’s a scam, others say it’s downright predatory. Personally, joining Pathrise in March 2022 was the single best thing I could've done for myself, and is still paying dividens to this day (something we’ll probably dive deeper into in another article).

The current state of affairs (2022-2023)

I spent March 2022 - September 2022 applying to jobs, learning different languages, frameworks, database technologies, and finished up my thesis for my master’s program. I sent out probably ~600 applications to SWE, Data Engineer, and DS roles, and got very few interviews. Just a rough estimate If I had to guess, I got ~5 coding challenges, ~9 initial phone interviews, and maybe 4 follow-up interviews after the fact. Not the best interview performance in the least.

But, after a long, arduous process, I landed a role as a Bioinformatician at SomaLogic, a proteomics company based in Boulder, with a really cool technology. Would I have done some things differently? Probably, and I’ll probably dive into what those are later. But I’m grateful I took that first step.

That’s all I have for now. I’m excited to share more of my story, and help out those who were in my shoes years ago. If you have questions, or just want to chat, feel free to reach me on LinkedIn or my email jon.dickinson17@gmail.com

Also, feel free to hit the button below if you want to support the page, and posts like this.

P.S. I don’t know how to remove the posts that came with this template when I forked this repo, and I kinda need the reference to the markdown files. So just roll with it for now. -Jon