Changing His Career, Not His Company: Gor Mikayelyan’s TripleTen Story

Gor Mikayelyan almost had the exact career he was looking for. After a long search, he had found a job at his dream company, Amazon. But just being at the right company didn’t mean he was in the right role.

So he decided to do something about it. Here’s how he joined TripleTen, mastered a new field, and found the vocation he had been seeking, all without leaving Amazon.

Getting his first job at Amazon

When Gor was in college, data science was already hovering in the background. He was studying managerial economics and statistics. It was a great basis for a career in tech. But instead of actively pursuing the new industry, he stuck with his areas of expertise. See, even before he got his degree, he had already found success as a stats tutor, so when he graduated, he just kept going.

Still, he was looking for more, and this led to his first job at Amazon: logistics analyst. It wasn’t quite the position he had in mind. “I would get a weekly data set and then manually fill up the empty cells,” he said.

It did show him how important data could be, though.

I saw how much impact a simple tool like Excel can have on a big company like Amazon, and that's when I decided to kind of pivot from tutoring students into data science. Gor Mikayelyan, TripleTen grad

He started out on his own and chose to study Python_{Is Programming Hard? Make It Easy with Python}, a key language for data science. He was slowly getting the hang of it, but felt like independent exploration wasn’t cutting it. “After learning Python for a few months, I realized I wasn't going fast enough and I wasn't learning as much as I wanted. That's when I decided to join a bootcamp.”

He checked out TripleTen. He liked the price and the job guarantee_{I’m Worried I Won’t Find a Job After the Bootcamp. How many graduates get hired?}, but one thing that he found truly attractive was the structure. At TripleTen, learning is organized into sprints, two- to three-week periods during which students can approach material and tasks as fits their schedule. At the end of each sprint, they have to deliver projects that get more complex over time. This perfectly mimics what day-to-day work is like in real-world tech companies.

The combo was right for him. He enrolled.

Raising his odds of success

As he was at TripleTen, this sprint structure kept him motivated. “It was my style of learning because you read about things and you apply those things as you're learning. And then you apply those things again.”

At the end of each sprint, he had something to show for it, a tangible milestone that proved to him that his studies were paying off. “Every sprint was a reward in itself when I learned something new. That gave me the confidence boost to keep going on to each and every sprint.”

But that’s not to say that the projects were simple. He found himself struggling to debug his code. “Errors would frustrate me because when I write code, I just want it to be functional and just give me what I want. But more often than not, things would actually not go my way. And I would have to deep dive and just research and see how I can fix my code.”

The TripleTen tutors_{Will I Get Practical Guidance and Feedback From Tutors at TripleTen?} were there to help. “They would help me break down the problem step-by-step. And if I had any questions, I could keep asking and asking until, in my own mind, I had an understanding of what to do.”

This extra assistance was also uniquely valuable, as he was juggling TripleTen, tutoring, and his job at Amazon. It was a challenge, but for him, it was worth it. “I didn't really worry about work-life balance. I just did everything I could to put myself in the best position possible to reach the goals that I want to reach.”

Landing the right job at the right company

He achieved those goals. In August, he followed through on the career pivot and landed a job as data analyst at Amazon. He has relocated to Washington, where he is doing the work he trained to do. “Now I'm working at a company that I have always wanted to work for as a data analyst. And I'm using the technology and the skills that I've been learning all this time.”

Day-to-day, these skills are helping him thrive. “Data wrangling is where I got the most value from TripleTen, which I would also say is the most important part of any project.” After all, as Gor said, “The meat is the data. The better the data you have, the better your machine learning models are going to do.”

He’s not just at his dream company. He’s also finally doing the work that he wants to. “I'm actually applying the skills that I've learned and actually enjoy doing what I do.”

Our pitch to you

If you’re looking for a bootcamp that will help you reskill to land the right career in the right field, then check out our Data Science program.