Morning
I generally wake up around 6:45am. I put on a pot of coffee and spend somewhere between 60 to 90 minutes going through the Thinkful curriculum. I then get dressed, leave my apartment in Northwest DC and head to the Metro so I can arrive at work by 9am. My metro ride is about 20 minutes, which is just enough time for me to open up my Kindle and read a few pages of books on machine learning that my mentor sent me.
Afternoon
For the next 8 hours or so, my focus is on my day job at a data investigations company. I started working there four years ago after graduating with a Masters in Middle Eastern Studies at the American University in Beirut. Today I am conducting an investigation on the commercial network of a money laundering organization. Essentially, my client wants to ensure that its financial instruments are not being used to bankroll illicit activity. My job requires me to uncover connections between individuals and companies across jurisdictions, often scraping databases to find such connections- that’s one of the reasons I enrolled in Thinkful’s data science bootcamp.
Evening
After a long day at work, I metro home. I spend about 30 minutes cooking dinner. Tonight I’m making Korean beef. Around 7pm, I pick up where I left off with my Thinkful work. I do a little SQL practice before I meet with my mentor Koyuki. Tonight, Koyuki and I are trying to troubleshoot an issue I’m having with my capstone project. I need her help assigning class indices in Keras while using ImageDataGenerator. I’m a bit tired so you’ll have to ask me in the morning what that means.
Sometime between 10 and 11pm, I finish my Thinkful work for the evening. I listen to the latest NBA podcast from ESPN to relax before bed. Tomorrow, I’m presenting my capstone project - wish me luck!