I am Ilkin Berker Topuz and I am 25 years old. I am a data analyst, but I would like to work as a data scientist. To do so, I have taken LinkedIn & Coursera data scientist courses. I also describe myself as a machine learning enthusiast, because I love to develop models. This is what drives me to become a data scientist or machine learning engineer.

As a data analyst, I try to deduce significant insights from the big data or sometimes I test a hypothesis about intuitive inferences. Using the big data, I can perform demographic analysis, behaviors analysis, churn analysis, and association analysis, or utilizing machine learning algorithms, I can create models that maybe we would like to increase weekend sales rate, valuable customers numbers or identify the customers that are about to churn and prevent them with actions. I have also work experience of forecasting sales or revenue, and A/B testing.

My educational background is kind of unusual and I can define myself as an outlier. I have studied chemical engineering in Bogazici University which is a prestigious university in Turkey. I was among the top 0.3% of the students in Turkey, and I was selected to Boğaziçi University Chemical Engineering department. At that time, I was unaware of the existence of such a field. Nevertheless, I was into programming. In university, my first programming course was C language. Then, we learned MatLAB to perform complex linear computations about mass, heat and energy equations.

After I found out there exists a field, I have learned Python and tried different machine learning algorithms using sklearn. Then, I also discovered that big data can be manipulated with SQL which is quite easy. 

When I was a senior student, I started as a part-time data analytics consultant at SnA Consulting which is a small company with approximately 30 employees giving consultancy to the well-known companies of Turkey in retail, telecommunication, energy and banking. After my graduation, I continued with them.

In SnA Consulting, I was working for one of the biggest retail construction market in Turkey. 

I used big data in order to perform general data analysis and find trends, or to create predictive models.