Hi, I am currently a Director of a proprietary trading company as well as an adjunct professor at the Business School at DePaul University in Chicago. I took the 12 week Metis data science program between April and June 2020 between the job transition. I wanted a full-time, in-person data science/coding boot camp. I had a commitment issue with pre-recorded videos. Also, I wanted a real time interaction with instructors to resolve any issues that I would face as opposed to getting into a rabbit hole trying to find the answer myself, since I sometimes do not even know what the issue is. While the Metis program was offered through zoom link due to pandemic, I am truly grateful that I chose Metis program to improve my quantitative and coding skills. I had such a high quality and efficient coursework and met amazing instructors, TAs and cohorts. I am very satisfied with the quality of the program as it covered a wide range of topics covering not just python coding skills but theoretical mathematical and statistical background necessary to become a good data scientist. I have advanced degrees in mathematics from MIT and financial economics from Stanford Graduate School of Business. While I had already learned many of the mathematics and statistics topics such as regression, classification, etc at school, Metis instructors taught the courses much more intuitive and in an engaging way that there were a lot of ‘ah ha’ moments that I realized how intuitive these concepts were, which I did not have back at these top schools. The instructors were also so good at presentation that it was such a pleasure to learn the way they taught. I learned a lot about not just the course material, but about the way they do presentations. Also, their attitude towards data science and learning set such a high standard that I was very impressed. I could truly see that they did this teaching not just as a daily job, but as their passion. Finally, I felt so lucky to be with such supportive and friendly cohorts that I would like to keep in touch with them even after graduation. I felt that I was always welcome in the group and wanted to work with them in the future. I loved the program so much that when my son (currently in elementary school) goes to college and if he decides to pursue a science and engineering major, I will enroll him in the Metis program as a gift for his college entrance. I think all the materials and skill sets that I learned from Metis are so fundamental and critical for any person with a quantitative major or a career path, that I want my son to learn these concepts and skill sets as fundamental building blocks no matter what his major/interest would be. Overall, there are many data science/coding boot camps or degree programs, and I am afraid that some of them focus on teaching students various technical skills without really emphasizing the fundamental understanding of when and why we use these techniques. I sometimes interview students out of master's programs in data analytics. While they claim they did many projects using many fancy machine learning projects, the majority of them do not have 'true' understanding of why they used the specific methods and why some approaches would work or not work. Some of them do not even understand basic concepts such as 'over-fitting' vs 'under-fitting', or 'R-squared' in regression. When solving real world problems, one has to have a solid understanding of the problem as well as the methodology that they want to apply, so that when a method is not working, they would understand why and what to do next. Just blindly repeating 10 different machine learning technologies without any idea of why they are working or not working is not acceptable. In that sense, I learned a great intuition on topics from Metis class, and am very happy with the quality of the program. It was totally worth the tuition. | 