I am thrilled to report that I recently received my work permit. The one-year license is valid until the Green Card process is complete. I will transition at Strata (my current company) to an advisory role by the end of May. Then I will start looking for a position in data science.

As part of that exploration, I talked to a nice guy who graduated a few years ago with a data science masters at Berkley. He suggested I start learning more about the Google Cloud Platform.

I trust his advice and have since signed up for the Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer course at A Cloud Guru. After that, I will take the certification exam. We’ll see how it goes.

On the data science front, it turns out the Elite Data Science course is excellent, and it is what I needed to cement what I have learned so far and put it all together.

Yesterday, I finished the third module in which we built a machine learning model to predict real estate prices. We started with exploratory analysis, cleaned the data, engineered some features, prepared the dataset for the models, and finally turned and fitted five algorithms (lasso, ridge, elastic net, random forest, and gradient boost).

I had already learned in DataCamp every one of the libraries used in the project, but this program structures the different tools in a very practical, streamlined, and results-oriented way. I think I am learning the way you would in an actual DS job, with a more senior practitioner sitting nearby and helping you go through the project from start to finish.

I sincerely recommend this program.

A very cool feature is that the projects reside in your machine, using the Anaconda software manager, and running the code in Jupyter notebooks. Everything I had done in Python was either on the CS50 web IDE or on the DataCamp site, where you run the code on the browser.

I am starting to believe that, little by little, I am becoming a Data Scientist. Level 0, mind you, but a Data Scientist nonetheless. Let’s keep it going!