After more than 20 years working in IT primarily as an Analyst/Programmer in the finance and telecommunications sectors, I was told my job was being outsourced to India. I thought about what I enjoyed doing and I enjoyed scuba diving and photography. So I decided to sell up and move to Far North Queensland to do underwater photography.

Unfortunately, that didn't pan out and I became a Tax Consultant. One day in 2015 I had a client who nearly put a chair through the wall as he was unhappy with his tax refund. To say this got my heart racing would be an understatement. After he left I sat at my desk wondering why the hell was I doing this job. I thought back to the work I used to love and it was ‘playing' with data.

I did some online research and the only place I could find that was offering data science was as a full-time student in Sydney. Well, my days of living like a poor student are way behind me. I simply could not afford to be a student in Sydney.

I wanted to get back into IT but as my skills had been outsourced to India and it was 5 years since I had been in the industry, I thought about what else I could do and decided that Project Management may be the route to go. I enrolled in an online Advanced Diploma of IT Project Management course through NSW TAFE.

That Christmas my casual work as a Tax Consultant came to an end. After a period of unemployment, I got a job working at Health Support Queensland in Release Management. The position was only temporary and in March 2018 I was told that the contract was not going to be renewed due to budget constraints.

Once again I went back to Google (what did we do before Google?) and found that James Cook University was now offering a Master of Data Science degree online. I applied and began the course in May 2018.

To date, I have completed the Graduate Diploma of Data Science portion of it and I am on track to complete the masters Christmas 2020.