Journey from Accounting to Analytics and Coding

It was just a while ago that I graduated from Singapore Management University with a Masters in IT in Business (Analytics Track) and currently undertaking a role as a data analyst in a FinTech firm in Singapore. I guess my journey of my transition from Accounting to Analytics have been such an interesting topic to my friends and family that I thought I could write something about my journey. Also, I have never been a writer myself so it will be interesting to me as well to how this post will turn out.

I took a degree in accounting and finance back in my undergraduate days in 2010. At that time, it was a practical decision for me because I know that finance and accounting is the core of every business and organisation and therefore a necessity and valuable knowledge to obtain. At that time, I was thinking that my career route was set in the path of finance and accounting. This means taking the common route of starting out in Big 4 accounting firms or financial institutions and hoping to end up as a CFO. The only technical skillset that I gain out of the course was excel skills and I thought it will be more than enough as we are just going to deal with just numbers and more numbers. After graduation, I went to work for a startup as a finance associate, dealing with typical finance operations such as petty cash, AP/AR and general ledger. Things got kind of boring due to the routine nature of the work. A year later, I joined a MNC as a financial analyst, dealing mostly with budget planning and financial forecast of the various departments that I was charged with. I would say that I learnt quite a lot from the experience but I was still not satisfied with the work I am doing.

When I was working for the MNC, I came across a workshop that was teaching data analytics. Back then, I have absolutely no background in area of computer science, statistics or even data science. I am glad that I attended the workshop because it became a turning point for me in which it opened up my eyes that there is a world of possibilities when you know how to deal with data. Data is becoming more of a valuable asset to each organisation and being able to make good use of it will reap significant benefits. During the workshop, we got to have a hands-on session with the data analytics software. The software has functionalities of artificial intelligence as well as data visualization. I never knew data could be displayed with such elegance.

Through this experience, I became very interested in the area of data analytics and started looking out for courses to help me understand this field. There are many resources in the web that can help you understand the topic but I chose to take the traditional route of obtaining a masters in this area. I can say that the journey was not easy at all especially coming from a person without technical background. It was a lot of grind to go through. Furthermore, I was taking the course part-time which means that I work from 9 to 5 before heading for a 3-hour class which starts at 7pm. I have classes 3 times a week. This increases the difficulty of time management throughout the period that I was taking the masters program.

There are broad areas of topics that the university offer, such as customer analytics, visual analytics, text analytics, machine learning and so on. Each class is about 15 weeks long which includes assignments, homework, project and exam. Most of my weekday evenings and weekends were totally burnt because of workload that I had. Be prepare to sacrifice a lot of time because of the course load requires a lot of commitment. Fortunately, I was single at that time so I guess I had more time as compared to some of my peers who are either already married with kids or having other commitments.

Nonetheless, it was a challenge that I was willing to take and push through to finish the entire course. However, I still felt that a master program is still not enough. There were times that I saw my fellow project mates useing python programming language to perform very efficient data preparation and analysis. Initially, I was pretty intimidated by the difficulty of coding but I realized it provided much more usage if you are able to understand the fundamentals of it. Immediately after the end of first academic semester, I immediately went to take up coding on my own. To be honest, I never thought of the day that I would actually pick up coding.

The journey was indeed a difficult one, learning subjects such as data structures to understanding algorithms. However, I was really satisfied that I gain so much when I learnt these concepts. As time goes by, it gets less and less intimidating and I was able to code python more proficiently for my data analysis. Using the popular Jupyter notebook, it allows me to present my findings to my fellow project mates in school. I felt it is so much more flexible as compared to using an analytics software for data massaging. You can also code some automation as well which makes life easier. Since then, for the rest of my projects, I volunteered to use python as my main tool for data analysis and I became the main coder in my team. It is very satisfying when you see your code being able to run smoothly and produce results that are insightful and interesting.

To be fair, I did spent a lot of time and money into obtaining and learning my materials. I subscribed to websites so that I can get resources to practice such as safaribooksonline.com and lynda.com. It was a hefty sum but because I spent a lot of time going through the materials to master the topics, the price was well worth it because you are able to have the resources easily for reference. I spent at least an hour a day watching coding tutorials and machine learning lessons. Frankly speaking, I was a slow learner and when I first starting writing my first lines of code, I would copy the code from the tutorial line by line and attempt to run till it was successful. Through numerous practices, I became more adept and better at learning coding languages. Till today, I am still watching and practicing coding tutorials to improve myself and continuously make myself more proficient, hoping I can be at the level of an expert software developer.

In a further attempt to improve myself, I took a coding boot camp that was heavily subsidized by the government. It was a 40 day boot camp organised by NUS Institute of System Science. It was an intensive course covering the syllabus for a full-stack developer. I gained even more knowledge because you are coding from front end to the back end, including creating database, extraction using SQL, using MEAN stack frameworks and also improving myself by mastering another set of programming languages called Javascript, HTML and CSS. I got to learn how to use confluence, trello and github during the course as well. As I was determined to be good at this area, it took a lot of sacrifice but the knowledge earned was well worth it.

I would think my route is less common among accounting folks and my passion to move into this area has spurred me to take on many things that I have never thought I would do. I guess at the end of the day, it is more of what you really want to achieve and be ready to take the challenge and finish it regardless of the obstacles presented. I have friends who thought I was a little mad because I was taking 5 modules in one semester, was still working full-time, was the main coder of the team and still went on to learn many other languages on my own. I can say now that I am no longer a beginner but still need way more practice to reach to where I want to be. As much I have accomplished a lot during the two years, I feel that I still have a long way ahead and will continue to improve on my skills and knowledge. Also, I don’t intend to lose my finance knowledge as well because I hope to be the bridge of finance and technology. I still read financial news to keep finance knowledge active.

Once you learnt a type of programming language, it becomes easier to learn another. Soon after I finished my last semester, I got a job at a bank which uses SAS software for data extraction and analysis and I had to pick up SAS programming language from scratch. Fortunately, I am more equipped and it becomes much easier to learn and easier to transition into another programming language.

Much has been said about my journey, I could have left out quite a lot of details during my two year transition journey but here’s a summary of things I did:

1. Completed Masters Course in Data Analytics
2. Completed 40 day full-stack developer boot camp
3. Learnt R, python, javascript and SAS as my main programming languages
4. Understanding of SQL and NoSQL and the various data management technology such as Hadoop, Spark etc
5. Use analytics software such as SAS JMP, SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS Base and Tableau
6. Gain immense knowledge in the developer world such as github, slack, trello, IDEs and other project management tools.
7. Delve deeper into machine learning and computer science after my completion of my master program
8. Spent at least an hour everyday of learning something different or new

My journey has not ended and I am still striving hard to be better. Though it cost some money but I guess I took courses that many people are interested to know whether it is worth it. Here are my two cents’ worth and it may vary from person to person. As a disclaimer, I am not promoting any of these courses and I have no benefits in doing so. It is my thought of how I benefited from these various resources.

• University Education — It is one of the fastest way to get recognized especially from a good institution but it is going to be cost-heavy in the short run. There are a lot of theories involved and projects which revolves around the academic world. A lot of commitment is needed to pull through the entire course.
• Developer Boot Camp — It is one of the fastest way to pick up coding because they through go practical workshops such as setting up a database, building a website, utilizing frameworks and making use of the developer tools for coding. Still expensive if not subsidized but it may serve a more practical use in the working world. After all you will need to sit down and code all day.
• Online Courses — Personally, there are many free courses and you can find some of them on youtube. It is not necessary to spend any money at all if you intend to learn to improve yourself. However, personally due to my eagerness to improve myself, I subscribed to three portals at that time and here’s what I feel about it. The prices are available on their websites and they have basic and pro version. Pro version normally offers you free exercise files which are good for practice.
• Safaribooksonline.com— By O Reilly publisher, but I love the immense number of books and videos in its arsenal. They have improved the interface and even have live online training where you can communicate with the trainer on the live chat. Overall, I like this portal the most.
• Lynda.com — This website has a lot of videos on coding and analytics. Very broad categories to choose from. The videos are very standardized which means you can see that every video has approximately the same format but it is very easy to understand. It even has other courses for business management, music, video and other creative work if you are interested. The videos are quite easy to follow as well.
• teamtreehouse.com — I was attracted to this website because of the advertisement and how it was able to help people around the world become developers. I took the basic version of this website to try it out. I would say as a beginner, it is much easier to grasp the knowledge from this portal. There are a lot of animations that explains the logic of the codes and the videos are very short(2–3 mins) which followed by a short practice quiz. This helps to enforce my fundamentals greatly. I would say it really suits people at very beginning stage.

In all the paid resources, there are trial versions so you can actually try it to see whether it is suited for your needs.

I guess I might been very hardcore on the way I am trying to learn in the area of IT and analytics. It might not be the best way but I feel that you have to start somewhere and push through, regardless of which route you chose to take. It has been wonderful in sharing my thoughts of my journey and I hope I could share more in the future. My journey has barely begun and I hope for all those who are still wondering whether the journey is worth it, you will only know it if you are willing to give it a try. Wishing you all the very best. Thank you for reading :)

I have recently created my own blog https://goingmeraki.com

and a youtube channel, hopefully to document more of my journey and my sharing to you all out there!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC274tF6HRQSza08IZlB15TQ/featured