Jessica Perez had turned the wall of her room into a mural of chaos. Post-it notes with the pros and cons of different career paths, ranging from accountant to professional dancer, hung before her gaze as the mellow notes of an IZAL song played in the background. Having created this paper maze, Jessica’s self-imposed task was now to find her own way within it.
‘I was on an extended leave after my company laid me off,’ she says today. ‘I had moved to Berlin relatively recently and I did not have much in the way of prospects or contacts. But I decided to take this not as a bad thing, but as an opportunity. I could totally reinvent who I was and what I did.’
Jessica was born in the Dominican Republic, and had worked in four different continents by the time she landed in Germany. Her university studies had been in Finance & Accounting, and she had built a career working with non-profit organizations across the world.
‘I had this feeling ever since school, that numbers speak but people don’t understand them,’ she remembers with a smile. ‘When I started working as a volunteer, I saw the way that these organizations had so much trouble finding funds, organizing themselves, planning for the future. I decided this was where I could make a difference.’
After 10 years working in the field, however, the termination of her contract in Berlin told her it was time to rethink her options. Learning German seemed like an obvious necessity to further her career.
‘I went to the job centre here in Berlin to ask about German courses,’ she says, ‘but the advisor there looked at my skills and shook his head. He told me I’d find another job a lot faster if I studied some new skills, rather than the German language, which takes much more than a few months to master.’
It was then that the idea came to her to add tech skills to her curriculum. ‘I have been obsessed with data and AI since I was a child. But when I went to school, Data Science quite simply didn’t exist as a career, or at least not outside Silicon Valley. I saw these Ted Talks were people told stories by means of data, and I realized – that’s the language of numbers. That’s exactly how numbers speak.’
Once Jessica picked the post-it with the words ‘Data Science’ on them, everything else fell off her wall immediately.
‘I started investigating coding bootcamps. I found 3 or 4 of them, but to be honest they all looked the same. Then I had a call with WBS CODING SCHOOL, and I perceived a vibe that was so human, and so friendly, that I thought – this is the type of learning culture I am looking for.’
Coding bootcamps are notorious for being intensive, challenging affairs. But once Jessica discovered how much she loved Data Science, she not only kept pace – she went beyond the curriculum.
‘I never had the chance to study something I was truly passionate about,’ she says, ‘and so I went all-in. Students aren’t expected to give up on their lives outside the bootcamp, but for 15 weeks I basically consumed nothing but Data Science material.
‘I had worked with Excel and project management tools, but I had never done anything remotely like programming, data analysis, simulations. And when I found that not only I could do this thing I had never done in my life, but I was good at it, well – it was exhilarating!’
At the same time, Jessica did not forget that the reason she was doing a bootcamp was to find a job. ‘I was extremely active on LinkedIn, the way that someone else might be on Facebook,’ she recalls. She began applying for jobs even while studying, sending out CVs, going for interviews, taking it in her stride whenever these returned rejections.
One day she was sitting at her computer, in the middle of one of her video-classes. Her phone vibrated on the table, and she spoke up with her classmates – ‘Just give me a second guys’ – then took the call.
It was from the civic organization Systemic Justice. They were calling to offer her a job.
When she returned to class, she found herself having to explain the pure dynamite in her mood.
‘Today I work as Finance Controller for Systemic Justice,’ she says. ‘Data Science has completely upgraded the way I work. Now I can organize our systems, make them efficient, minimise human error.’
A Data Science bootcamp enabled her to pursue a path that was not open to her when she started out, but ultimately the drive to succeed came from within her.
‘A bootcamp is for people who are curious, who want to know how things work. And I am so happy I stayed curious throughout my life. Because it got me a job, naturally, but also because I can prove that my intuition was right all along: numbers speak. And now I’m the one who can translate what they say.’
Jessica Perez graduated from a WBS CODING SCHOOL Data Science Bootcamp in December 2023, and is currently employed as Finance Controller for Systemic Justice.
