Soaring Into Software: One Student’s Journey to Becoming a Data Scientist

Joshua Filiberto Castillo Dueñas dreams of flying planes one day. But as a full-time teacher in Mexico City, he didn’t have enough hours in the week to complete flight training. That’s when he started considering new career paths. 

Joshua was working in a private school, teaching programming robotics to kids from age six to 15. While he loved teaching, he knew he could do more with his skills — and decided to start learning on his own. 

Tecnológico de Monterrey Data Analytics Boot Camp was the ultimate boarding pass — taking Joshua from teacher to student on a journey to new heights.

Getting ready for takeoff 

Joshua was still working as a teacher when the boot camp began. He taught during the day and went straight to class afterward, which left very little time for anything else. 

When COVID-19 prompted a switch to remote learning, Joshua was pleased. “The courses were kind of designed to be online, so it worked out,” he said. 

From day one, the boot camp threw new information his way. “I felt that I was learning a lot in a short window of time, which is exactly what I wanted,” Joshua said.

He was already familiar with some of the platforms that would be covered in class, including Pandas — a software library written for Python. Though Joshua had hated Pandas before, learning its ins and outs changed his opinion. 

Simultaneously learning and teaching programming concepts proved highly beneficial to Joshua, both as a student and a teacher. Although the concepts he learned in the boot camp were more complex than those he taught his students, the program’s overall design inspired him as an educator.

“The way the instructor managed the class was really useful,” said Joshua. “I’ve taken a lot of courses about AI and cybersecurity, and they were okay, but this one was different. I really loved it.” 

In past educational experiences, Joshua had been taught lessons and given exercises to practice new skills. Classes involved a lot of white boards, and great note-taking was necessary for later study sessions. 

“I felt like I always learned more at home than in class,” he said. “With the boot camp, I learned a lot more during the class because we had extremely hands-on practice.”

Making a smooth landing 

Upon completing the course, Joshua embarked on his job search — and the boot camp’s career services team was there to help every step of the way. With the boot camp under his belt, Joshua started receiving calls every week from interested employers — one of which landed him his current role. 

Joshua is now a data scientist with InfoSapiens, a boutique consulting firm specializing in Big Data and data science. 

“I’m working on a lot of projects. Some are about natural language processing for chatbots, and others are about research studies,” he said. “I’m even working on one right now about COVID-19 and ventilators.” 

Since the boot camp ended, Joshua has gotten certified in both simple and creative artificial intelligence, as well as cybersecurity.

Joshua loves what he does and hopes to stay with InfoSapiens for some time, but also aspires to move abroad one day. Having completed 14 of the 40 required training hours for his pilot certification, he plans to finish up in the future.  

Ready to take your career to new heights? Explore Tecnológico de Monterrey Boot Camps in coding and data analytics today.