At 16, I dreamed of becoming an economist. At 17, I moved a thousand kilometers away from home *alone* convinced I could fight inequality with supply-demand curves and righteous anger. Then I met R. Then Python. And suddenly, I wasn’t just studying the world’s problems, I was hacking them apart line by line.

Let’s be clear: I didn’t choose data science. I tripped into it.

First Love (Economics, You Dramatic Bitch)

Economics was my teenage romance —all passion and confusion, like scribbling poetry about GDP in the margins of my notebooks. It made me feel brilliant and clueless in equal measure. I loved its big theories, its messy humanity, the way it let me rage against systems while still sounding academic.

But here’s the thing about economics: it’s great at asking why the world is unfair. Terrible at telling you how to fix it.

Affair of Convenience (R, You Beautiful Disaster)

Enter R, my gateway drug. It was clunky, stubborn, and somehow still charming. (Think of it as the bad-boy ex who taught you what you actually deserved.) I wrote my first script. It crashed. I wrote another. It lied. But when it finally worked? Magic.

Then Python sauntered in: sleek, popular, and way too powerful for its own good. Suddenly, I was polyamorous with programming languages, and my econometrics professor was judging me hard.

The Ugly Truth (You Will Cry. A Lot.)

Here’s what no one tells you about data science:

• Debugging is just crying with extra steps. (Pro tip: Wine helps. So does swearing in German.)
• Your first model will be trash. Mine grouped CEOs with circus clowns. Accurate, but not helpful.
• You will Google things like “why is Python mean to me.” (Spoiler: It’s always user error.)

But then *click*, you automate a 5-hour task in 3 lines of code. You build a model that actually works. And suddenly, you’re not just analyzing data. You’re weaponizing it.

Why Stubbornness > Smarts

Data science isn’t about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about being the most persistent.

Economics taught me to question. Data science taught me to solve. Together, they’re my supervillain origin story —and I’m here for it.

To Every Woman Who Thinks She’s “Not Technical Enough”

Sweetheart, neither was I. I cried over spreadsheets. I once broke an entire script because I forgot a comma. But guess what? My code still runs. And if I can go from “what’s a for-loop?” to building NLP pipelines, so can you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with my laptop. We’re in a toxic relationship, and it’s the only one I’m keeping.

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