My journey from Afghanistan to U.S.
When I started my undergraduate in 2010, I was already working for US government through USAID/Chemonics program supporting Afghanistan’s ministry of Agriculture in various sectors like Irrigation, Cashmere, and agribusiness where I was responsible for monitoring and evaluation of the agribusinesses who were receiving help form the U.S. government. After the completion of the project, I started working for as project manager for Akramzada International, where I successfully led the police training project. As a result, I was awarded best employee of the year by the Akramzada International CEO. Going forward in my professional career, I then joined USAID/Chemonics a data management coordinator for $125 million Regional Agricultural Development Program — South (RADP-S) program in Afghanistan, I was responsible for data management of all the M&E department such; providing supervision for data collection in the field through smartphones, checking the quality of data, cleaning the data, collation of data, analyzing the data, and finally I was involved in preparing the monthly, quarterly, and annual reports for USAID. Additionally, I was responsible for Agribusinesses deal verification where I was overseeing job creation by the RADP-S supported agribusinesses. And my last job before coming to U.S was as monitoring and evaluation Manager in Afghanistan Capacity Building Activity Program (CBA) funded by USAID. CBA project’s goal was to help the Afghanistan’s ministry of education in achieving their millennium goals. In CBA project, I developed a complete functional M&E system in place from scratch, and also conducted baseline and midline studies. Furthermore, I developed a learning plan, theory of change, revised indicators, and developed a logical framework for the CBA program.
Through working with USAID/Chemonics International and other local organizations, I had the opportunity to travel across the country observing the real Afghan life beyond Kabul and few shiny cities. I first had saw how people were deprived of their basic rights and how the government was unable to provide very basic public services. Observing that, I was determined to do something about it to bring a positive change. It was this reason that developed my interest in Politics and governance. As a result, I joined the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF), and pursuit Political Science and Public Administration, where I found the opportunity to reflect on those experiences. Most notably, two things about the recent decades of Afghan history consumed my attention at AUAF. One, how these different periods of lawlessness or strict Sharia law had disabled the country to update its political and legal systems.
When I moved to the United States of American in 2019, I wanted to pursue my education and was I was uncertain about whether to study political science related master’s degree or change my field entirely. After one year of reflection and consultation with friends and former professors I decided to study data science. Thus, I started searching the internet as well as seeking advise from my friends who are already data science professionals. On the internet I came across various data science bootcamp, I made a list of top 3 bootcamps and send their respective information to my data science friends and two of the three friends recommended General Assembly’s Data Science Immersive for variety of reasons, the most convincing reason on why I joined General Assembly is it immersive curriculum and experienced instructors.
According to Pichai “ The power to transform societies and revolutionize contemporary lives lies within the knowledge of big data.” This idea of transforming and revolutionizing the societies encouraged me pursue my career in data science. On the other hand, as per (Ma, 2016), the traditional manufacturing industry in the future should not rely on the production of goods, all the machines must have the ability to think and communicate, and the whole industry will finally become the end user of internet and big date. Taking a look at all the global enterprises in the world today, most of them enhance customer behaviors and working efficiency by the analysis of big data. All these notions and the recognition to the world’s development trend has inspired me to pursue data science.
I believe this Data Science Immersive bootcamp at General Assembly will enhance my skills in the Python Language, Data visualization, statistics and other dimensions of data science. I feel I have reached a point where I now want to combine considerable experience with a strong academic background to achieve my ambitions in order to create a more effective society. Data science is undoubtedly a developing sector, In today’s day and age, every small or big companies or corporations need data scienctist for data analysis, automation, data mining and other data science related tasks. Same applies with project management, business management, governance, and even intelligence sectors. It is my belief that data science will become an integral part of doing business in the future. This is because data science is useful in understanding what we do good or bad in today’s market as well as predicting future trends.
My projections for the future are all very positive and I believe that the industry has considerable potential for continued growth, development and subsequent expansion. It is my most sincere belief that pursing a data science immersive bootcamp from General Assembly is an outstanding opportunity and an incredibly wise choice. I am extremely optimistic that this bootcamp is perfectly aligned with my long-term goals.