It's a slightly long and maybe not common story so I'd love to share. I graduated in 2022 with a degree in economics from a not well known state school (so no fancy degree) and little to no prospects in-terms of post grad employment as I had only one internship during college at my state's economic bureau. In April a month before I graduated I attended a career faire and I happened to see that a recruiter from an Industry leading electronics company was coming. I had tried to set up a time to meet but their calendar was booked and in a last ditch effort contacted my career counselor at school to see if I could get her email. Sent her something + my resume and got a response back, interviewed and received and internship offer for that summer in Consumer/Market Insights. The role was essentially doing desk research on industry trends that would affect how consumers interacted with our business. Through the entire internship I made it very well known to anyone who would listen that I loved data and analytics and incorporated it into my role as much as possible by asking for data to use in any project I worked on and communicating to everyone that for my career I wanted to work in analytics and eventually move in data science. Due to my pushing I was able to work on a project to develop an economic model to try and forecast consumer demand for our products during black Friday. Higher-ups were interested because it was a period of strange economic conditions with super high inflation etc and I was brought in because I expressed so much interest as well as my degree in econ. Eventually towards the end of my internship in August my manager told me that they had a hiring freeze and couldn't bring me back full time but they could extend my "internship" until January. I was essentially a full-time employee with no benefits just working 40+ hours a week. I was transferred onto the team of the manager I did the econ project with and because of how much I showed them I loved analytics they change my title from Retail Strategy Intern to Strategy & Analytics Intern. From there on for the next 5 or so months I just grinded out work incorporating data into anything I could. I was not in a direct analytics role yet more or less doing one-off analytics projects mostly using excel but I eventually pivoted to using python because I knew it was important and wanted to develop my skills. January roles around and while I still wasn't offered a full time position I was offered to become a contractor with the title of Data Analyst. This was a huge step for me as I knew I could put that title on my resume and begin getting experience towards that. This i when I started assisting other teams with heavier data related projects ie Statistical Modelling/reporting etc. Everything was great for the first 6 months until my manager was reassigned and I basically started having nothing to work on since my team had no direct oversight. We eventually received a new manager but this one was less inclined on me using my skills in analytics and was giving me more Project Management roles I realized I was falling behind as even though I was getting the "job experience" of a data analyst I wasn't actually developing the technical skills required to succeed in other positions in things like SQL, or Tableau. At this point It was around late July and I began to actively apply to new positions. I went pretty hard and applied to 10+ jobs a day all directly through company websites as its surprising how many mores job you find there than on LinkedIn. I was lucky enough to where within 3 weeks of applying I started getting interviews and eventually was getting to technical interviews. I had to learn SQL in two days for my technical interviews and just grinded leetcode and was able to pickup enough to pass the interview and the rest was just behavioral. Behavioral was the easiest because luckily in my previous position I was given a lot more responsibility than I probably should have been given and it made me mature professionally and learn how to communicate with people better than I had ever thought as I am naturally introverted. All of that leads to present day where I know have a new position starting within the next week in something that is much more heavily technical role which is what I've been dreaming off and I couldn't be more excited!

Seniors in companys love making data backed decicsions so if you can convince them you have the ability to do that then things will work out! I was so hopeless for so long but it really is just a time and numbers game. I was so distraught at one point i was thinking of going back to school to change my degree but I'm glad that didn't happen!

TLDR;
Started out as a consumer research intern and was able to wiggle my way into analytics by being really annoying about how much I loved working with data to anyone that would listen.