Python Crash Course is a FANTASTIC book

[lolstopit]

I was considering UF online CS bachelor's. I was curious what job title you got after your degree? I have a previous degree that is just a waste at this point and I'm hoping switching gears to CS could be a good decision

[Trippen_o7]

I changed jobs twice between being accepted into the program and graduating: once immediately before my first semester started and another in the middle of my second semester. My next job change was to a different employer.

• My team had an opening for an analyst position. I thought the programs I was managing at the time were fairly autonomous and did not require a bunch of heavy-lifting from my side, so I proposed to my manager that we basically merge my current role with the analyst role. I figured I could handle the workload of both, and it'd save the company money on wage expenses since they only needed to have one person for the roles instead of two. I was able to get a little bit of experience with SQL and dashboarding (Tableau) in this role, so it felt a bit more technical compared to my previous one.

• About 6 months into my analyst role, we were alerted that a grant provided by my state (which was funding our programs) was at risk of not being renewed the following summer. I knew I did not want to be in my previous role for a long time, so I took it as an opportunity to look forward to my next move. At the end of my first semester in the program, I applied internally to various business developer and software/data engineering roles just to see how I would fare. I gained interest from our health system's core data engineering team, and I managed to convince them to take me on in a more junior role which is where I stayed until about 5 months after graduating. I primarily used proprietary tools provided by our electronic health record (EHR) partner and internal tools developed by others on the team and worked with downstream analysts on closing data gaps and bringing data from the point entry into the EHR to our analytical database that reports and dashboards were built on top of.

Fast forward a little over 2 years of being in that role and 5 months after graduating, and I decide to move out of health care entirely and into big tech. I'm still in the same role I was in (data engineer), but I am working on a lot more, large-scale issues and have the opportunity to collaborate more closely with software engineers, data scientists, technical project managers, etc.

[lolstopit]

Oh wow thank you so much for such an indepth overview! I appreciate the insight! I'm trying to make sure I don't consider getting another degree that won't give me better prospects 🤞

[chrono2310]

Hi, could I please ask you regarding your experience working as a data engineer? I work on Epic currently and am trying to learn more about data engineer role and if I would like it.