Hi, everyone. I am Nuran, and I’ve started learning DS self-paced program only in March this year. This is my first post here, and I’m glad to tell some words about reasons why I attended to Data Science course. Some few words about myself and my background. I graduated MA in Economics in 2003 and hired to a first job place in heavy industry company (an upstream sector in a state oil company) as a financial analyst with a focus on modelling investment projects. Comparing to other types of what usually junior finance staff does my work required more “technical” skills rather than pure financial basis. On the other hand, realizing some complex logic in Excel models, including such types of features as consolidating different excel files to one, constructing interactive control keys for multi-case options and automatizing reports for management, required a good understanding of how excel and mainly its’ bool functions work. Over the last decade I’ve had a chance to work jointly with a lot of different high-qualified experts from investment banks, “Big 4” consulting companies and our partners on M&A and direct investment projects. I could say, that it gave me great experience and best practice and promoted me to better job places. However, this is what usually called a comfort zone, when someone sufficiently developed his knowledge. And those feelings and concerns are the main reasons for looking a way to expand personal growth. Choosing DS was based not only on the fact that nowadays it is one of the most popular and high demanded areas. As I suppose, comparison to other areas, like WEB-development, system programming or distributed databases, DS has greater flexibility in using its’ tools within different types of projects and ideas. For instance, why not to make a financial model using Jupyter Notebook (for calculation and output reports) and SQL (storage all input data) instead of classical spreadsheets software, and add some smart statistical models to predict global inputs on that? Now, it is just a very rough idea. My second reason was based on some concerns about the perspectives of experts in financial modelling. The core idea of most of IT-systems in big corporations is to automatize business processes. In financial divisions, first victims of that were accountant experts. Over the last two decades, the number of accountant staff dramatically decreased. So, finding a new area or expand existing skills with new ones is a question of preparing myself to a different kind of future. As I mentioned before, DS in this focus seems to be the best way to do that. And finally, the program covered in DS is very interesting for me. I’ve just finished only 5 sections in Module 1, however, have realized a scale of variety and coolness of new things which is good motivation driver.