This is my first post on a series of many to talk mostly about Data Science. I decided to start it to talk about my experience on Metis Data Science Bootcamp. It’s a 12 week immersive Data Science program and I’m currently attending Spring cohort in NYC.
About me
To get a better context on what this blog will be about, here’s a little personal context: I’m Colombian, I live in Bogota, and have a Computer Science degree there. I have worked for several years in Data Warehousing and Big Data Frameworks. I’m passionate about coding, programming and algorithms and a couple of years ago fell in love with all these Machine Learning, Linear Regression Models, Clustering, Predicting… What I like to call “Playing with the data” and some people call “Data Science”. So I decided to study more about it. They say that a Data Scientist is either a statitian who’s very good at programming, or a programer who’s very good at stats. I’ll try to be the latter.
Why a Bootcamp?
So I got the programming skills covered. But I’m rusty on all the statistics, math and probability you need to know for these stuff. There are a lot of online courses that you could take, most of them free and high quality. That works for many people, but for me it was a little hard to get the free time between my job and my personal time. I knew that, in my case, it had to be on site. Now I thought about a masters degree, or a PhD… and there are many of them out there! Most of them one or two years long. But lets face it: This world, and this area of expertise changes very fast. What you learn now will be useless in, maybe a year (?), so it’s important to learn the basics and what’s underneath, but not spend too much time on the technology that, either way, we have to keep studying and updating ourselves. So that’s what a Bootcamp is. A new methodology that, in short time, will cover all the topics you need, in one or two technologies, that will require a lot of time and self study. Seems like an assisted information injection.
On a next post I’ll tell you of the first project we developed, in only one week! (Yes, that’s the speed of this thing). The good, bad, the people, the teachers, to get an idea of what it feels like to be a Data Scientist-in process away from home.