First Blog !!
Hello Medium Friends !
As this is my first post in Medium, I decided to first introduce myself briefly in this post for two main reasons; First: I would like you to know me better and second: I have plan to write on Medium continuously (hopefully!!) and in few years from now, I think I would like to look back and compare my first blog vs. the most recent blog :-). So, here is Me:
My name is Mehdi. I born and raise in Iran. After finishing my MSc, I decided to pursue my PhD in North America. I came to Canada in 2007 and started my PhD at University of Alberta. All of my formal education (BSc, MSc and PhD) are in Petroleum/Reservoir Engineering. After finishing my PhD in 2013, I joined industry. I have this chance of working with major Canadian oil producers (Cenovus Energy and Suncor Energy). The work that I was doing at Cenovus and currently doing at Suncor was kind of SME job. As much as I really LOVE what I am doing, but after few years of working with Cenovus, I found I am not type of person that can stop learning and I decided to do something solely for personal development. I confess at the time that I decided to do it, my plan was purely “personal development” but right now that I am writing this blog, is for both personal development and changing my career path. Again, this doesn’t mean I am not enjoying what I am doing, but I strongly believe that all of us should have plan B (or maybe even Plan C, D…) in our professional life for What if ? and unpredictable scenarios.
in 2017 I started with educating myself a bit more about project management. I worked hard on that and I got my PMP certification which is among the most reputable certificates for project managers. Although I didn’t work as pure project manager in my career path so far, but I was Technical Project Manager for several multi-million dollar projects and I truly see the effect of educating myself in project management and how I managed those project before and after being certified PMP.
That was not end of story though. As I always was passionate about finance and financial marker, I considered considerable amount of time to self-educate myself in Finance. In 2019 and through one of the conversation that I had with one of my close friends, I got familiar with CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst). As you may familiar with that, it is a self-study program that you should study AS HARD AS POSSIBLE and do the exam. After passing three separate exams and proving you have enough work experience in finance, you will be a certified CFA. I did my level 1 exam in 2019 and with zero experience in finance, I passed the exam. Currently I am level 2 candidate, I supposed to do the exam in June 2020 but due to the COVID situation, first it has been postponed to December and right now it has been postponed to May 2021.
one major part of CFA exam is quantitative analysis and in Level2, quantitate section is mainly focused on regression with brief discussion about “FINTECH”. After searching a bit more about FINTECH, I found how passionate I am to this area. specially that I had solid background in statistics, I was educating myself in finance and what else do I need ?? Yes, true… I needed to improve myself in Data Science/Machine Learning and improve my coding skills. And that was exactly what I did parallel to preparing myself for CFA.
After passing several online courses from Udemy, Coursera and edX, I dedicated most of my times to Nano Degree programs of Udacity. I have completed 2 Nano Degrees so far and right now that I am writing this post, I am in the third NanoDegree Program : Data Science Nano Degree Program.
I also applied for Georgia Tech University for the program of Online Master of Science in Analytics and fortunately I got admission for that program.
So, here I am :-). initially my plan was to just focus on personal development. but right now, in addition to personal development I have this motivation and hope that sooner or later I will land at the data-related job.
I am so happy that right now I am in the journey of improving myself in Data Science/Machine Learning program.
Thanks for reading my first blog. I know it might not be so professional format blog but I promise to improve myself in the next coming ones :-)
Thanks, Mehdi
