First let me start off with, I am so sorry for the poor quality photo! I feel it is important that you guys get to see who I am, so that you can see what inspiring data engineers look like! I also don’t take many photos, so I kind of have to go with the ones my fiance takes for me.

Who Am I?

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My name is Brett Plemons, I am (currently) a Statistics and Data Science student at Kansas State University, set to graduate in May of 2020!! Woot, GO CATS!

However, that is not where I started. I first graduated from high school in 2012 from a smallish town in Maryland, I am a long way from home! I know what you may be thinking but no, it has not taken me 8 years to get my bachelor’s degree.

When I first graduated from high school I had no idea what I wanted to do and so I went to visit my sister in Arizona for the summer after I graduated. When I got back I got a job working for a Verizon store, really only because my friend worked there. After starting though, I thought it was pretty sweet, I was making a lot of money and since it wasn't a corporate ran store, we got to do a lot of cool stuff. Mostly IT type things like computer and mobile device repair.

That job didn’t last long, and again I was in a situation where I did not know what I wanted to do. I knew I really liked computers, but I didn't want to go back to school. So, I went with the next best thing, the Marine Corps AMIRIGHT! That thought process mostly came from my dad having been a Marine.

Well, to my dismay, while in high school I was one of those kids with guaged ears and so they wouldn’t let me join. Kind of stupid if you ask me, but what do I know?

Back to the drawing board again! At this point my parents basically told me, “Either go to school or move out, your choice!” Which really didn’t seem like a choice at the time. However, I am thankful for the push to go to college as I found a deep love for learning!

When I first started college I wanted to do something super cool, like designing spacecraft! No….really, that is what I wanted to do. So, I enrolled in an Aerospace Engineering program at my local community college. (Clearly, I didn't understand what Aerospace Engineers did, haha).

Once I figured out what Aerospace Engineers actually did, (during my first class!). I quickly switched over to Computer Science. My dad had his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Cryptology and so growing up we always had technology around. Not to mention on of my best friends Dave Hurley was already, to me at least, a computer genius! I just took a couple of classes each semester until Fall 2014.

In October 2014, my dad passed away from heart failure and so my entire family relocated to…. you guessed it! Kansas! I quickly enrolled at Kansas State University in their open option program. That basically, for those who don’t know, just means “I have no idea what I want to do…”

I never realized how dependent I was on my dad up until this point. I didn’t have a home, I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life…it was kind of depressing.

I basically did that typical college stereotype of “finding myself”. I went through several majors, sometimes multiple in a semester….oops! First I think was Political Science, then Criminology (What was I thinking!?). After that I think I went into Biology because I wanted something that would allow me to both think critically, and logically.

I don’t know if you know this but, there is a lot of programming in Biology, mostly Python. Here I was in Biology, and found myself programming again. It really made me realize how much I love developing and programming in general. So, here we go another switch, but this time back to the beginning and something that has defined most of my life, something computer related, Statistics and Data Science.

That was definitely the best choice I have ever made in my college career for sure.

Because of my switch and my obvious career outlook choice (the title of my blog Data Engineering) I have really dedicated my current life (by that I mean detriment my social life, like I had one…) to learning SQL, Scala, Java, Python, and all things Data Engineering. I really just love the whole process of Data Streaming, Warehousing, and database architecture in general.

Well, that brings us up to now. If you made it this far, sorry for the great wall of text, thank you! I hope you stay a while and read more! If you just skipped to the bottom:

TL;DR

I got into Data Engineering after a long journey and a love of the ever changing nature of Data and the Data age we live in.