Back to school

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Hanna told me, during her visit in the East Bay, that she could totally see me being in UC Berkeley. A few months later, her prediction came true: I became a student in UC Berkeley's San Francisco campus! I started attending a course that upgraded my skills in data analytics and visualisation. See, before I went to school, most of the data analytic tools I used were self-taught (I learned as I needed the methods).


On the first day of class, my cohort was told that our classroom sessions were 10 hours per week and we were expected to have outside study hours of around 40 hours a week... understandable because we were covering material that's typically learned in around two or three years. We were expected to submit weekly individual projects aside from three group projects. I thought it won't be too hard; after PhD, what could be harder, right?

Wrong!

The PhD training I received equipped me with the confidence that I could learn new domains (after all, I took up cereal chemistry while having a background in microbiology... quite a jump, I should say) and the ability to ask the right questions (for me) in order to learn new concepts. However, the rapid pace and the foreign nature of the material kept me studying well into the wee hours and I've lost some weight and what's left of my social life because I had to work doubly hard to understand what I needed to learn.


In fact, autumn and winter just went past without me noticing the season too much (just like when I was doing my PhD).

But through the difficulty, I became friends with my classmates (some left the class to pursue other interests) and my cohort's instructional team.


I was placed in teams in which I had to get my classmates to push their boundaries, as well as to push mine, so that we could get output out of the data we were exploring.


My patience was tested; my frustrations reared their ugly heads; and my penchant for celebrating small victories came to the fore.

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