At the beginning of 2015, due to a prolonged downturn in the oil price, I was given a years leave of absence from my job as a Drilling Engineer in Norway. I was scheduled to go on vacation around the time I found out, so before I moved my life from Norway, I had two weeks to think about what to do next. The way I saw it I had three options:

Get another job in Oil and Gas, or try and move into another field;

Go back to college and get a new set of skills; or

Travel, explore and party;

There weren’t really any Oil jobs going at that time, and I didn’t feel like rushing back into work anyway (despite the downturn we were very busy in Norway, until we very much weren’t). Travel would’ve been great, but left me in a precarious position if there was not a job for me at the end of my year off.

That left college, which then begged the question: What to study?

I was forced to think about what it really was about my job that I enjoyed, and I realised that the most challenging and enjoyable projects I had worked on all involved data manipulation and processing. At that time, I didn’t know Data Science was a thing, but reading up on it really opened my eyes to this new world, and I realised that this was where I wanted to be.