I Spent $100 on GCP Credits and Built a Data Science Portfolio

I wanted to break into data science, but I didn't have any projects to show. Then I discovered that Google Cloud gives $300 in free credits to new users. I used those credits to build a portfolio. I used BigQuery to analyze public datasets. I used Vertex AI Workbench for Jupyter notebooks. I used Cloud Storage to host my datasets. I even used Looker Studio to create dashboards. At the end of the month, I had four complete projects: a customer churn prediction model, a sales forecasting dashboard, a natural language sentiment analysis tool, and a recommendation system. My bill? $0. The credits covered everything. I put the projects on GitHub and got my first data science interview within a week. The $300 in free credits didn't just give me tools. It gave me a career path.