Transformation of the Week
Mert Bozkir

Transcript

Lusk: Hey Mert, congratulations on being chosen as transformation of the week. Tell us a little bit more about your background.

Mert: It’s great to be here. And I’m Mert from Turkey. When I started college, I also started my data science journey. So I did a lot of pandas ,scikit-learn stuff back in the time. So it’s been almost 3 years. And yeah, here we are.

Lusk: So what put you on this path to learn Gen AI?

Mert: It was back in my childhood. I just love Iron Man and sci-fi movies. So I just want to have, you know, Jarvis or like, E.D.I.T.H. or those kind of AI stuff in my life. And that’s why I just started researching about what is this machine learning artificial intelligence. Like back in the time there was generative adversarial networks hype. It was the root of more like generative AI space. After step by step, like learning scikit-learn panda, right now, learning LangChain, LlamaIndex haystack, it drive me through the all the data steps to the journey to generative AI.

Lusk: So this all started with you wanting to be Iron Man. That that’s pretty classic. Have you been able to put anything that you learned in class into practice, whether it’s personal or professional?

Mert: Yeah, of course, like we did a lot of hackathons together from people from AI makerspace. And also I have a lot of friends from all over the world. We did a lot of on site. We moved hackathons together from devposts or like level up AI platforms. A lot of projects that deployed on AWS, GCP, like in production systems.

Lusk: So you’re currently still in school. You graduate next year. What are you planning to do with your gen AI knowledge?

Mert: I just want to gain experience from the work that I do daily. I have some kind of idea list in my notion, and I want to solve all of them, one by one using gen AI tools in the future, maybe five, ten years later, I want to build my own company, of course.

Lusk: So what words of wisdom do you have for someone who is considering a career in AI?

Mert: I just personally thought all this stuff was hype back in the time I wasn’t thinking like it was valuable on the business scale. And then after joining AI makerspace and talking with peer supporters, with people from like all around the world experienced in software engineering and AI space, people were building a lot of cool applications, solving real problems. I was seeing the cohort as like investing in myself. I was staying up all night until 3 a.m. and 4 a.m., and then getting back to my corporate internship at like 7 a.m.. It was crazy for me. Don’t make time zone stand in your way.

Lusk: So if you want to follow Mert’s journey, you can find him on LinkedIn X and GitHub. Mert, thank you so much. Congratulations again on being the transformation of the week.

Mert: Thank you Chris. It was awesome to be here.