Data Science Dojo

My husband bought this class for me as our anniversary gift, at the beginning I laughed about it, but in the end, I sincerely believe this was a great gift! We both had a good time in class, and we loved it!

Here is a breakdown of my review:
Content 4/5... Read More
Difficulty Level 3/5
Classroom Experience 5/5
Value 5/5
Location 5/5
Bottom line: I would highly recommend this class to my friends and my coworkers

#Content 4/5#

The boot camp mapped out the entire Machine Learning Life cycle. You can immediately apply the content to your work/project and start using the tools and models. Of course, you still need to learn more techniques that are more specific to your business/problem, but the boot camp at least showed you where to start and what may be relevant for you to learn to solve the specific problem. We did not have time to cover regression, IoT, Block Chain in class, but have learning materials regarding the topics that you can learn by yourself after the boot camp.

#Difficulty Level 3/5#

This is not an advanced statistic class or coding class, and most of the content is not new to people who had statistic class before. Even for people who are new to the topic, Raja made it reasonably easy to understand. I talked to some experienced students (including PhDs in the statistic field), and they also agreed that even though the content was not new to them, but the way it was structured and being able to relate to the real world business cases made this class unique and valuble.

#Classroom Experience 5/5#

Not only Raja is a great instructor, but also his team provided excellent support whenever we had questions. Another critical factor is the diversity of the students. There were Executives, engineers, developers, analysts, college students, professors, entrepreneurs, social media influencers and they were from all kinds of industries like IT, health care, consulting, manufacturer, energy and all over the globe, Europe, South America, Asian...Everyone brought fresh perspectives to the class, and just the networking opportunity itself was well worth the investment.

#Value 5/5#

I once saw a beginner level two-day PowerBI dashboard training for $3,500, if people pay for that, this boot camp is ten times more worth the money. I went to another data science boot camp in Toronto from a university last year, and it covered almost the same content and cost the same. But that I had no clue how to use what I learned in that class in my work, while after this boot camp I know how to build a useful model, a basic one, but at least I know where to start. The class itself is well worth the money, plus the networking opportunity, the supplement learning materials, and useful souvenirs (each class may be different, but ours was a heavy-duty backpack, notebook, coffee mug, and bunch of other stuff). I would have taken the course even the price tag was higher.

#Location 5/5#
We took the 2019 New York City class, and it was located on the 59th street, between Park Ave and Lexington Ave. There were many options for hotels and Air BnB. There was a subway station right outside the building, but we didn't use it since it was 5 mins talk to where we stayed.

#Other thoughts#
The content of the class was not new to me, and I learned the most of the statistics concepts in undergraduate, graduate classes, and another data science boot camp. But this was the first time I felt I could actually use those models, codes, and tools to build something real and use them at work.
The instructor, Raja, was putting more emphasis on letting us understand how the theory/model works for businesses and why it works/not works. He did not make us memories the code but pushed us very hard to truly understand the statistical as well as the business logic behind the code/model.
The boot camp itself was five days (50 hours), but there are pre-boot camp learning sessions(which were very helpful) and after boot camp learning materials. Plus they also gave us several physical books along with the PDF versions. So leave extra luggage room for the books and gifts if you need to travel to another city to attend the class.

The instructors do an awesome job making the foundational principles accessible and training you in tools that challenge and allow you to explore your data skills - whether your a novice or advanced. I would recommend this bootcamp for anyone working... Read More with data in any capacity. Your understanding of the process and what is actually happening in different learning methods, algorithms and libraries will make you a better at identifying and solving the real-world business problems.

I am a marketing professional with zero background in coding/development or data science. Our marketing agency wanted to better-understand Machine Learning to educate our clients and prospects about practical business and marketing applications, so a... Read More few of us attended this course. The instructors were incredible and able to break down complex concepts into easy learning material. The days were intense (8 hours + homework), but the learning was invaluable. I was able to learn R and Azure from zero, and now can build predictive models, recommendation models, and machine learning models! This course will not only give you the skills to build and apply models, but ensures you know PRACTICAL application and how to think through model application from a strategic business perspective.

Very intersting areas of data science and machine learning are introduced. The instructor takes care about every detail, explaines everything on real examples. It is not only a theory, big part of the course is the practical implementation. All needed... Read More basics for understanding the machine learning in data analyses are presented. Definitely, it is worth to attend this course!

Instructor
-great explainer: intuitive, highly relatable real-life example are used to walk through difficult concepts and to engage class in discussions. This is typically done PRIOR to reviewing the course material which makes it much easier to understand... Read More and grasp the concept
-the instructor is deep in a highly technical space yet clearly passionate about teaching, it shows

Bootcamp
-Covers all core key concepts in data science
-Walk through examples in depth to illustrate the family of algorithm (teaches how to fish)

-Start with theory then immediately pivot to real life applications and practices.
-e.g. the emphasis on starting business problem first before translating it into a DS problem.

-Kaggle competition keeps it fresh and exciting

If you decide to attend – do the prep work and commit the full week to get the most out of it.

As stated in the other review -- “be prepared, the program is definitely intensive, and you get the most if you're prepared and willing to dive in and invest time in practicing these skills.”

The 5-day bootcamp is done extremely well. All the key topics of data science covered in a digestible way, with a strong emphasis on business application. The level of participants is also top notch - data science and related business professionals from... Read More a breadth of companies/industries, which boosts the quality of our discussions and the overall experience.

From my own experience, I think you'd get the most value of this program if you're at least conversant in basic statistics or have a basic level of exposure to data science concepts. In my opinion, it is ABSOLUTELY worth the investment of ~$3k and a week's worth of time, which is more feasible for company training vs. an extended 10-12 week part time program (which I've also done before).

Be prepared though, the program is definitely intensive, and you get the most if you're prepared and willing to dive in and invest time in practicing these skills.

I don't usually leave reviews but this was by far the best training I have had outside academia. Raja is extremely talented at explaining machine learning algorithms in a way that makes them intuitive and allows one to understand how to tune the modules... Read More which employ them (while also emphasizing the need to look carefully at the big picture before getting into the weeds); certainly one of the most talented teachers I've ever seen.

I really enjoyed attending the bootcamp, particularly for its focus on business value of data and a foundational understanding of various ML algorithms. Raja is an excellent teacher, and kept the class engaged for the entirety of the five 10 hr days despite... Read More the intensity and volume of material being covered. Despite having had fairly good exposure to statistics and ML, it was instructive to have Raja explain the key mathematical constructs behind classification and regression models, model evaluation metrics, over-fitting and bias-variance trade-off -- all in the context of real business situations. The course struck a good balance between breadth and depth of content, and provides a good platform for anyone to start incorporating data-science into their business.

Data Science Dojo is an amazing boot camp - it worked perfectly well for me although I have certain background in statistical analyses and ml itself. I believe that same would apply to various types of experts (as it was the case within my class itself)... Read More since the camp provides a very ambitious overview of almost anything that may concern a data scientist - from the field itself to the important big data engineering.
On top of this, the vast content is easy to follow thanks to the excellent teaching style of Raja. He starts from the basic logic and it helps enormously. I have been recruiting data scientists myself and have seen that this is a key point to differentiate someone who can do the job or is not more than just technically aware. (From now on if I meet someone who has passed the dsd boot camp, I would know with 0.05 probability of type I error that I have an expert in front of me.)
Raja is able to comprehend and react to any eccentric question which I believe is so very important for any teacher.
At the final day of the camp (no matter that exhausted from my late night attempts to cheat on the Kaggle competition) I was realizing that I do not want the camp to finish (and it had nothing to do with going back to work or the good food).
Highly recommended.