I was a diesel mechanic, and now I’m the head of AI at a startup. Here’s how I made the switch.

• Daryl Roberts, a college dropout, went from diesel mechanic to lead AI and machine learning engineer.
• To get up to speed, he enrolled in an AI boot camp, took extra classes, and read white papers.
• Freelance AI projects helped him land his job, showcasing adaptability.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 30-year-old Daryl Roberts, lead AI and machine learning engineer at Obney.ai, an AI consulting firm near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His identity has been verified. This story has been edited for length and clarity.

I was a freshman in college when my grandmother passed. My parents had health problems, and her income had really helped. I thought that being in school was selfish, so I left and joined the Marine Corps Reserve to get healthcare benefits and a small paycheck. I also began looking for a high-paying civilian job that I could do when I was off-duty.

Even though I had never changed the oil in a car before, I decided to go for a diesel-mechanic position with a local industrial-equipment dealership. In the interview with my future boss, I said ‘I’ve never done this before, but I’m a fast learner, and if I don’t figure it out, you can just fire me.’ He said we had a deal.

I was a diesel mechanic for about three years, working with heavy equipment like forklifts, manlifts, and skid steers. Then I began moving up the ladder. I became a service administrator, a dispatcher, and eventually an operations manager.

But while I had made it to the top, I realized I was unhappy, and that’s when I decided to make a move into AI. ChatGPT was blowing up at the time, and I had been into robotics and machine learning since I was a kid. My family was in a much better place financially, so I thought, now I can afford to be a little bit selfish and go back to school. But I could not see myself going to a four-year university.

An AI boot camp

One day, I was scrolling through Facebook and saw an ad for an AI boot camp called Fullstack Academy that was being offered through Louisiana State University. I signed up. It was a six-month online program with instructors and career coaches for two hours a day, two days a week. I was in the first cohort, and they were offering discounts. I got a military discount on top of that. I paid around $10,000 total.

We started with statistics, then machine learning, traditional data science, neural networks, and things like that. A few months in, I was able to quit my job to immerse myself in learning thanks to the support of my fiancée.

I signed up for about 50 additional classes with Udemy, an online education program, on topics that the boot camp didn’t cover, like transformers and reinforcement learning. A lot of them were on sale and cost only around $10.

Toward the end of the boot camp, I began looking for an AI job. I built a little AI bot that could automatically apply to openings on LinkedIn for me, but I got nothing but rejection emails. I started to think I really screwed up.

Pet projects pay off

Meanwhile, I was working on AI projects for myself and posting them on LinkedIn. One caught the attention of the owner of a company that uses AI to analyze the punches and movements of boxers. He asked me if I was interested in doing freelance work. Things didn’t pan out, but it was a wake-up moment for me. I realized I didn’t need a full-time job. I could just freelance.

A networking connection I had made through LinkedIn helped me get my first paid gig using AI to analyze chicken behavior. I was tracking chickens around a farm. Then I did some 2D to 3D modeling. I got tons of these projects, and learned a lot very fast, because I was pushing myself really hard.

Now that I had some experience under my belt, I went back to looking for a full-time job. I started by going to a tech conference to network, and I met a cybersecurity vendor who said he was planning to start an AI company. We hit it off, and he promised to keep me in mind if he were to pull the trigger.

Six months later, he called and asked me to meet with him and his cofounder. They told me they were building a consulting firm to help small businesses with their AI needs, and because of my freelancing experience, I was able to offer my two cents. It was a really great moment for me, and soon after, we all began working together.

50% of the way

It’s now been a year, and we have accomplished some amazing things. I’m the head of AI, and some of the interns I manage have master’s degrees or PhDs in the space. I’m able to offer them advice, which is nuts to me. It’s just crazy.

Looking back, the boot camp was amazing, and I have an AI machine learning certificate with LSU’s mark on it, but it probably only got me 50% of the way there. You have to couple it with something like I was doing with the Udemy courses. I was also reading research papers.

AI is changing so fast that you need to be constantly learning and getting your hands dirty. If you’re only putting in the minimum effort, you’re not going to get great results.