Introduction

Welcome to my page! My name is Salih, and I wanted to give a not-so-brief summary of who I am and what I do.

The Story of a Curious Little Boy

My dream of studying a postgraduate Mathematics degree in the U.S. started from when I was a young child. Even at that early age I had taken up reading encyclopedias and biographies of philosophers and inventors for fun. While most children my age couldn’t get enough of superman or batman, I yearned to make discoveries and help humankind like my own personal heroes - Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Leonardo da Vinci, and Galileo and many more. Even as a first-generation college student, I found a way to succeed by persistently pursuing my dream and finally made it to the U.S. five years ago upon being awarded a government scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. degree after being selected as 3^rd in the field of Mathematics in Turkey. I was then accepted to the Ph.D. program in the Department of Mathematics at A&M (at the time of my acceptance, A&M was ranked 13th in the world in the field of Mathematics!) During my graduate studies, I gained expertise in computational mathematics, statistics and learned programming languages: MATLAB, Python, and R, as well as basic SQL and C/C++.

Though it was difficult learning such advanced topics in a second language, I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge. However, three years into the program, I realized that my dream of simply finishing a Ph.D. was secondary to my desire to be impactful on a much bigger scale like my childhood heroes had done. I soon became disillusioned and enjoyed my studies less and less. However, things began to look up when I started taking PhD-level Statistics courses. I instantly fell in love with the idea of using my strong mathematical and computational skills to solve real-world problems for others. Slowly, my interest began to shift from Academia to the burgeoning fields of Machine/Deep Learning & AI.

After much self-reflection and discussions with mentors and colleagues, I made the decision to convert my Ph.D. degree to a M.S. in Computational Mathematics. While still having the opportunity to take statistics courses related to Data Science and Machine Learning to earn an Applied Statistics and Computational Sciences certificates. Additionally, as I wanted to continue to hone my skills in Data Science, I supplemented with high-quality courses available online (will make a post about the details later). Hence, I currently spend most of my time learning on MOOC platforms since one can easily take courses from premier colleges such as Stanford, Harvard, MIT, etc.

To sum up my rather long bio, if life gives you lemons, make the absolute best lemonade you possibly can! There are countless reasons to complain and give up on your goals when things get hard, but the only one thing is enough to keep growing: Passion.

I am here to share my experience and knowledge on various topics such as Mathematics, Statistics, and Machine & Deep Learning. I will be posting stories and articles under the Posts section, while also sharing my personal notes and other useful information under the Notes section. I love sharing my knowledge and experience, as teaching is one of my life-long passions. Please do not hesitate to contact me to ask anything and everything (literally), if there is any way that I can help in your DS journey!

And what better way to close than with some quotes from one of my childhood superheroes:

• Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.


• Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.


• I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.