Learner Spotlight — Dilara Karabey

Meet Dilara, who only wanted to sharpen her Python skills by learning with “Data Analyst in Python” career path but ended up landing a job as a Data Scientist, Web & CRO Analyst at Perfist! Things turned out pretty well for someone who was anxious and struggling with imposter syndrome before getting started.

1. First, what are your preferred pronouns?
She/her

2. Could you tell us where you live?
Istanbul, Turkey.

3. Tell us a little about your background. 
I’m from a linguistics background. I started studying at Boğaziçi University in 2017 in the Linguistics Department. I’ve always had an interest in programming since high school and have participated in hackathons, etc. mainly doing robotics, but I couldn’t say it was my passion. Then, after I moved to Istanbul to study, I completely stopped coding, saying we’d meet again.

After the pandemic hit, I was shaken by the cold truth that I hadn’t really decided what kind of a future I was looking for in the field of linguistics. Therefore, I tried to see if I had some other interests I’d like to dive deeper into and build my future upon. Then I came by the scholarship program at Dataquest, decided to try it out, and loved it. I can say I personally bonded with Dataquest. Afterwards, everything snowballed, and now I’m establishing the Analytics & CRO Department at a digital marketing agency and am dealing with a great amount of marketing data.

4. What’s your current job title?
My current job title is “Data Scientist, Web & CRO Analyst,” and I work at Perfist.

5. Tell us a bit more about getting your current job. 
After I completed my Dataquest courses, I decided I should start looking for a job or an internship. I was hired by another digital marketing agency as a data science trainee in 10 days and got promoted in four months. After the promotion, I also got into digital marketing analytics and got to know the data I’d been processing better.

6. What about your job excites you?
Marketing is a very fun field with interesting dynamics. Working at an agency is actually what really drives me because when you work for an agency, you have a wide range of clients from different domains, and every single one of them has its own secrets to explore and analyze.

7. Is there something about this job that you’re very good at?

I’m really good at identifying problems and offering optimal solutions. I’m also really handy with the pandas library in Python.

8. How did you feel before starting the journey? 

I actually felt really anxious because I had stopped programming for a while back then due to imposter syndrome.

9. What do you like about the Dataquest learning platform?

I actually loved it. The narrative was very clean, and the guided projects were gold. The no-video concept is actually better in my opinion because I can get distracted easily sometimes, and when that happens during a video, I have to rewind it so that I won’t miss the subject. I also spent some time in the community, and it was really nurturing. I was well-armed when I landed my first interview!

10. How was your journey with us? 
It was really easy for me, actually. Like, natural. And I did create a lot of cool projects; I loved the guided projects sections. By the time I completed the path, I was equipped with a lot of useful data skills.

11. What new skills did you learn?
I have learned most of the fundamentals about handling data and also some other useful stuff, such as Git or Bash.

12. What was your learning process? 
I remember that I studied almost every day and have fully completed the path! It took me approximately three months to complete.

13. What would be your advice to someone who is considering getting started at Dataquest?
My advice would be to go for it and really get into the community section. Also, guided projects are really useful, so they should make the best of them.

14. Tell us what you are most proud of after learning with Dataquest?
I’m proud of whoever wrote the guided projects! Also, the community managers were really good at keeping the community nurturing and safe for us.

15. Finally, where can people find you on the Internet?
Here’s the link to my LinkedIn profile; feel free to send a connection request!