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How Machine Learning Changed my Life

3 min readMay 29, 2020

As a full-time data scientist, a part time consultant, and a full-time father and husband I’ve paused to reflect on how I landed here.

Data science was not something I went to college for and definitely not something I learned in high school. In fact I wasn’t even aware what a data scientist was until I graduated college and finally met one years later.

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It was at this point I realized that in some way I had already been a data scientist for the majority of my short career. In fact, I was often a data scientist in college and even before I knew what one was. This was when reality sunk in. I wasn’t defined by my degree or even my job title. College for so many of us is simply a litmus test to understand whether we are able to endure academic and real-world challenges, solve problems critically, and develop skills that follow us into whatever professional journey we undertake. When I embraced the fact that it wasn’t my past experiences that defined who I was in my career, everything changed.

Learning Something New

At this point in my life machine learning was a foreign concept, something abstract that I assumed needed a degree in computer science to even begin to understand. But as I sat in the airport waiting to catch a flight to Florida I realized the opposite was true. Like so many things…

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Nathan Alexander Lear
Nathan Alexander Lear

Written by Nathan Alexander Lear

Data scientist, husband, and father.

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