Journey from Digital Marketing to Data Science
For the last three years, I worked in digital marketing — planning and buying media for clients. With anything digital, data and measurement are becoming increasingly more important with the advancement of tracking abilities. I was always in the role of leading reporting for my clients, however I typically found that the work was unnecessarily manual and tedious.
I became interested in data analytics while I was in college, and eventually minored in business analytics (only because there was no major option). I learned a few tools such as JMP, SPSS, and Qlikview, which were essentially my introduction to data science before I even know what data science was. After graduating, I stumbled into media as everyone else who is in media does as well.
The first agency I worked at was innately a traditional agency — meaning TV, print, and out-of-home — that branched into digital for survival reasons. While the team I was on had strong digital knowledge, there was no structure in place for automated reporting. Since I had some background in data analytics and simply wanted a more efficient process, I rallied to have a couple of colleagues in analytics help me build out a data pipeline. I worked with one colleague who used R to download, clean, and compile raw data which I then took to a second colleague who used SQL to format the data into a Tableau dashboard. While I didn’t have the R or SQL expertise, I was able to understand the structure of these languages and knew how to translate what I needed into the respective frameworks.
My second and most recent agency, was digital-born and bred with Google as their anchor client. This was quite a 180 from my previous agency, and I was now expected to provide rigorous analysis despite not being an analyst. We had seemingly endless data from buying our own ads through Google ad platforms and even had a dedicated data team that built and maintained a global DataStudio report with complex latency calculations. My role was to figure out what questions we were trying to answer, what data we need to answer those questions, and how we were going to analyze that data. I also built a majority of the visualizations in the Data Studio report so that we can easily access data that we need. I knew I was getting closer to where I wanted to be in my career.
While I really enjoyed my buying and planning roles in digital media, I found myself constantly gravitating towards the data side of the job. I finally decided I was going to build up my technical skills and as on brand, found the most efficient way to do so. In February 2021, I quit my job and joined General Assembly’s Data Science Immersive program, a full time, three-month long bootcamp. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy but I’m really enjoying the process of finding myself programming more naturally and starting to think like a data scientist.
