| | Ryan M. | I just completed the Chicago bootcamp and I can say that the Data Science Dojo team exceeded my expectations. I had some R coding experience (but no formal education) and work in the derivatives industry, using statistics and regressions pretty regularly, so I had some strengths in a few areas, but my skills and stats theory were very very rusty. I did a great deal of homework on competitors and settled on Raja's team, in no small part due to the location as I am a Chicago local, but also due to:
R/Python flexibility
Strong curriculum (and professor) in machine learning
End-to end hands on experience with trade practitioners
Interaction and energy that comes with a bootcamp
I expected to learn a great deal, but I also assumed I would be swimming in confusion more often than not. I had, after all, spent more than a semester in grad school trying to find a rhythm while also trying a variety of online learning supplements. There is so much out there, the landscape changes quickly, and many schools are willing to charge for Data Science courses because the subject is hot, but they don't produce any of the materials, and therefore everything is choppy and incoherent. This confusion was not the case in Bootcamp, as the lessons were clear, logical, and consistent. The lessons were also an excellent mix of intuitive and informational instruction, demonstration, hands on walk through of each and every step, intellectual challenge, and the application of working toward and completing kaggle project. The intellectual challenge, by the way, can be scaled to meet anyone's learning needs, in my opinion, as this team is very well educated and well heeled in the space...and definitely effective educators as well.
I could go on for a while, but I would ultimately need to address every point in the curriculum because everything was worthy of mention. Suffice to say that I am now comfortable scraping websites, parsing twitter feeds, building machine learning models in R and Azure ML, acquiring and utilizing Hadoop clusters, setting up an eventhub...and even better, I have a sizable toolkit to do build upon going forward. I still need to practice to get better, but I have everything I need to take my career and my understanding of the world to another level.
Don't waste your time anywhere else. The Dojo will exceed your expectations as well. |
