Getting Back Home with a New Career: Keith Robinson’s TripleTen Story

What do you give up for the sake of your career? Most people willingly exchange forty hours of work a week to gain professional advancement, benefits, and a paycheck. But then there are careers that give less and demand you put up with more: fewer benefits in exchange for more time at work. Less time spent with family in exchange for more instability.

And for Keith Robinson, that tradeoff was no longer worth it. This father of two had worked contract jobs for ten years. He’d labored through 12-hour days. He’d spent months on end without projects only to then be sent away from his family for extended stays in anonymous hotels.

He knew he needed to make a major change. Here’s how TripleTen helped him land a new career that’s giving him stability and more time with his wife and kids.

Away on contract

Although Keith graduated from college with a degree in math and statistics, he decided to go for management consultancy roles. At the first company he contracted for, the work could be grueling.

I was working 12-hour shifts, 12 days straight, and then getting two days off. Keith Robinson, TripleTen grad

Not only was the schedule demanding, but the work he got would be inconsistent. See, although he had an agency helping him find his next placement, that didn’t guarantee he’d have steady contracts. “There'd be some times when I'd work eight to nine months consistently straight through and then there'd be times when I wouldn't work for six to eight months,” he said.

After that first place, he did move to a new company where the hours were less demanding, but the core issues of instability and time away from his family hadn’t been solved. Everything added up. He’d spent a decade in this career, and he’d gotten sick of it: “I was just like, ‘I can't do this anymore. It's been 10 years and I need to get something stable.’”

Not only that, but he saw just how much his family needed him at home.

My son is turning 12 here next year. He's about to be a pre-teen. He needs me home, so I need to be more present physically for my family. Keith Robinson, TripleTen grad

So he started looking into options. With his degree in math and stats as well as his experience in analysis, data science looked like a good path to pursue. The thing was that although he’d been adjacent to programming as part of his major, he’d kept away from it. “I kind of avoided coding when I was in school,” he said. “And I wish I didn't.”

He knew he had to gain that knowledge to get into the field when an ad for TripleTen came up on YouTube. He had already taken a basic course on using Python for finance, but it wasn’t the complete renewal he was looking for. After looking into it, TripleTen’s practical education seemed promising to him. He had a conversation with a career advisor, and he was sold.

Expanding his expertise

Keith started the data science bootcamp with an abundance of confidence. After all, he already knew the basics of the field; that’s what had made him choose data science in the first place. But that wasn’t to last long.

I breezed through sprint zero, breezed through sprint one, got to sprint two, breezed through sprint three, because that was the statistical analysis. And then sprint four hit me and I was just like, ‘Yeah, this is all new.’ Keith Robinson, TripleTen grad

He wanted to learn, and that’s what he was doing. And after 10 years away from studying, finding time to tackle the complex material took dedication. But even as he was out on contract, working long intensive days and coming back to a bed that wasn’t his own, he kept at it: “I would work 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., come to my hotel after work, get ready for the night, and then hop online with a tutor at 9:00 at night.”

Those TripleTen tutors were crucial for him, too. Any time he had an issue, he’d be able to book time with one of these experts, and they’d explain anything he was unclear on at the level of detail he needed.

[The tutor] was breaking down everything to me and we would take it a section at a time instead of trying to take the whole thing at once. Keith Robinson, TripleTen grad

If he had a smaller question, he could ask TripleTen’s AI assistant, Dot. This assistant, trained on TripleTen material, was designed to help students get unstuck if they just needed nudges in the right direction. Keith found this eminently useful. “I used the mess out of Dot,” he said. “The AI was a tremendous help.”

And partway through the bootcamp, he got a sign he was on the right track. His friend had also enrolled in TripleTen’s Data Science program, and was five sprints behind Keith. That friend ended up stumped, and Keith stepped in.

I was able to help talk him through his project, and it felt like a huge accomplishment for me because now I understand the material and I’m able to teach someone that doesn’t understand it as well. Keith Robinson, TripleTen grad

None of this is to say the bootcamp was easy. Keith was essentially mastering a whole new field in nine months. That demanded time, attention, and effort, and he often found himself on the verge of calling it all off. But the clarity he had in his motivation kept him going: “In the back of my mind, I'm doing it for my family. And that was pretty much it. I can't quit on my wife or my kids. So, I just had to keep going.”

So he kept going. In fact, even before TripleTen started focusing entirely on career acceleration, he’d already begun looking for a job.

Getting the job — and more time at home

Specifically, Keith had gotten proactive and started reaching out among his network. He got some hits here and there, and in the meantime, he and his fellow students started improving their job search assets: “We had a group of about six to eight of us. We were looking at each other’s resumes. We were looking at each other’s LinkedIns,” he said. “We were doing extensive work.”

He heard back from his network; he'd gotten an interview at Citibank. He had one conversation that he thought didn’t go well. Still, he made it to the next round, and he felt that one went better, but then he didn’t make it to the subsequent round. He didn’t let it get him down, and when Citibank reached out asking him to apply for another role, he went for it. Again, it didn’t pan out.

Just like with his studies, he persevered, and left his resume on the bank’s hiring platform. Weeks later, they reached out yet again. “I was like, ‘I’ll do it,’” he said, but he had no illusions. “I didn’t think I was going to get it.”

He met with the recruiter. Then he met with the hiring manager. Then he had a panel interview. And following all that, he got the job offer.

Now, he’s Assistant Vice President, Senior AML Data Science Analyst at Citibank, where he’s joining a team tuning the bank’s models that prevent money laundering: “We have these red flags of sorts that trigger the system to give you a hint that there may be some money laundering activity.”

It’s his and his team’s job to make sure that process works as intended: “If it's capturing too many false positives or we're missing things and getting a lot of false negatives, then we have to tune the model to make sure that it's still capturing what's needed by the regulators.”

He’s helping thwart bad actors and keep the bank in line with regulations, but importantly for him, the conditions are exactly what he was looking for. First of all, he has benefits for the first time in his career.

I just signed up with my benefits last week and I told the benefits officer, ‘Hey, I've never done this before.’ Keith Robinson, TripleTen grad

He’s getting health insurance, dental insurance, and vision insurance on the company plan. And the stability extends to his paycheck, too: “I know for sure every two Fridays, I'll have a check coming.”

But the change that’s resonating the most with him is the time he’s reclaimed with his family: “Every weekend I'm home, so we can go and do something fun. The last three Fridays, we've had movie nights, where we all just watch a movie together and I let the kids pick a movie they want to watch. And on Saturdays I now have the availability to do fun activities with the family like the beach or Main Event.”

Follow his lead