It's no secret that competition for data science jobs is fierce. You may be in the process of filling out your first application, or you might be 100 applications in. Either way, I want to share my story with you in the hope that it will inspire and motivate you to keep pushing on. I love my job as a lead data scientist, but it was not an easy road. I faced continuous rejection and disappointment; at one point I was ready to settle for a career I hated.

When I was waking up at 6 AM to study Support Vector Machines I thought: "This is really tough! But, hey, at least I will become very valuable for my future employer!". If I could get the DeLorean, I would go back in time and call "Bulls**t!" on myself. The truth is that reality is much more nuanced, and the fact the field is still far away from being mature isn't helping at all. The classical story goes something like this: "data scientists spend 80% of their time getting, cleaning and managing data, only the rest is spent on analysis and machine learning".

PECULIUM is the first Crypto-Savings platform that combines traditional savings, blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence. PECULIUM allows you to invest and grow traditional savings in cryptocurrency based projects. It operates transparently over the Ethereum blockchain by means of "smart contracts". PECULIUM has created an ERC20 standard compliant token called Pecul (PCL) to interact with the platform. The Peculium platform secures your tokens in electronic wallets which are supervised by the blockchain – a network governed by computer algorithms. That brings us to another key component of PECULIUM, the AIEVE.

An 18th Century automaton that could beat human chess opponents seemingly marked the arrival of artificial intelligence. But what turned out to be an elaborate hoax had its own sense of genius, says Adam Gopnik. Lately I've been thinking a lot about the Turk. That sounds, I know, like a very 19th Century remark. "Have you been thinking about the Turk?" one bearded British statesman might have asked another in the 1860s, with an eye to the Sublime Porte and Russian designs on it, and all the rest.