Towards the Random Forest

Hello, all and none. About a week ago I began a journey into the field of data science with an intensive course at General Assembly. As a part of this it is recommended that we post a number of blog posts to document our journey, often with examples.

I come from a varied background, I graduated from college in 2008 with a degree in Communications and Psychology. As that year was the height of the recession, I had a hard time finding a job in my field. It had always been my dream toto retire and open up a coffee shop of my own, and a friend recommended that I go get a job at Starbucks, as I would be able to have that dream of my own store in five years instead of 30. So I did. Just under the five year mark,I had a store of my own. By then, I was looking for a different direction and was grateful that I hadn't waited for retirement before I tried running my own store. I am not a people person or a people manager. What I was good at was reading the financial statements and parsing them for actionable items and I quickly became the SME among peers for interpreting this information. Hence, a few years later, I made a shift into working in public service, specifically as a Business Compliance auditor for an income tax agency. It was here that I really began to notice that I enjoyed working with larger piles of data. Processing hundreds of forms in a day, solving new problems with programming solutions in Microsoft Excell, and no peers or colleagues with an inclination to work with the available data, I knew I needed more training. When my spouse received an attractive job offer in another state, nearby one of General Assembly's Data Science Intensive bootcamp locations, the opportunity was too good to ignore. Hence, a month into a new apartment, in a new state, during a global pandemic where large data is important to understand, I found myself logging in to their online learning platform, ready and eager to get my hands dirty. Time for a trip into the random forest.