No Plan B: My journey into tech.

(This blog post was written in 2020)

Back in Oct 2018  I had cut my working hours to 30 hours per week (working as a clinical pharmacist - writer at the British National Formulary) and I was dedicating significant amounts of time to learning coding, listening to machine learning podcasts and trying to navigate some sort of self made curriculum. I had the luxury of time! However, life was about to change significantly.

In Nov 2018 my mum who was ill with chronic fatigue and depression, became extremely acutely unwell and my priorities drastically changed overnight. I was also between 6–7 months pregnant and suddenly all of my energy was focused on helping my family to ensure round the clock care for my mum. I was still trying to hold down a job working and commuting to London 3 12+ hours days, whilst also enduring frustrating phone calls to NHS mental health staff and figuring out how we could get help for my mum.

Fast forward to Dec 2018  when my mums health improved, thank god! Then fast forward to Jan 2019 when my son was born and I began the immersive experience of being a mum myself. The sleepless nights, the exhaustion like you have never felt before. The feeling that you wonder the next time you will surface for much needed air!

Before having a baby I had completed a masters whilst working full time so I was sure that having a baby would not be too difficult - I was wrong. I had never appreciated how with most things you can put them down and have a break, or you can have a good nights sleep, or how you can know a deadline for an essay or an exam and work to the bone until deadline day and know that after you can relax. One of my best friends who works as a maxillofacial surgeon likened having a baby to “an on-call shift that goes on indefinitely and where your bleeper is constantly going off”. I think this is the most accurate description yet.

It was during those first months that I was still obsessed with getting a job closer to home, something, anything to do with coding. It began when I emailed Code First Girls (CFG) whilst on holiday in July 2018. I knew I wanted to get a coding python job but I couldn’t afford the luxury of doing a poorly paid PhD because I had a mortgage and a baby to support. CFG’s had stated that they ran courses to learn coding - free for girls. Anyone out of education for less than 2 years. Bingo! Just 2 weeks before giving birth I was emailing and receiving emails from CFG  - nothing like an impending birth to give you a kick up the bum. Anyway they stated they would be running a coding course in html, css and javascript in Brighton Feb 2019 until April - 2 hours per week in the evenings. I thought , ” that is my ticket”! It was a step in the right direction.

So when my son was a month old I left him with my partner with some pumped breastmilk and headed for the office of the company Brandwatch to learn some coding in an official capacity and to figure out how to get myself a coding job based in Brighton. This was exhilarating - as most new mums can testify you never get alone time, it is unheard of. But here I was off to Brighton, to do some coding to make a website. During one of the sessions I spoke to one of the instructors and it turned out they had a data science team at Brandwatch and she suggested I could have the email and meet up with one of the team. I took this advice and did this. We discussed some natural language processing - something I had looked into and done a bit on datacamp. I was then waiting to hear if there would be internships that year - which there was. Fantastic. So I quit my stable clinical writing pharmacist job (terrifying) hence the title of this piece, “no plan B”, and interviewed and accepted an internship as a data scientist intern at Brandwatch which was a phenomenal experience.

My manager was fantastic, my son would only be 8 months old when I started so it was important to me to not go back to work full time as I was still breastfeeding and my son had been hospitalised with bronchiolitis and had allergies and eczema so being able to be there for my baby was important for me. I worked 10am–4pm, 3 days a week. Which gave me enough time to utilise the internship but also meant I still had a lot of time to spend nurturing and breastfeeding my son. The days I worked were fantastic - I found a childminder who I adored and my son adored. My parents and my in-laws looked after my son on the other 2 days. And when I was at work I was ‘Steph’ again. I got to go to the loo on my own, make a barista style coffee! It felt sensational, to be learning and growing in so many different ways. I also think knowing that this would only be for 3 months helped me not feel trapped, it felt like a honeymoon period. During this time I embraced natural language processing(NLP). I learn about data pipelines. I suggested a project of conversation clustering to my manager which I was extremely interested in. This project involved extracting insights from twitter data and using NLP machine learning and algorithms.

I then managed off the back of this to get a job in data in a company that makes sports app. Still in Brighton, 4 days a week. Again bingo.

Feb 2020 and I began helping to teach on the code first girls Python course run by Brandwatch. This continues to be a fantastic experience. I am so passionate about teaching females to code - I know from my own experience I was not interested in coding for codings sake - but give me a big data task/problem to solve and if the solution can be coded in python I am there.

I continue to love everything about python, data, NLP and beyond.