| | Matt Childers | I just finished the Data Science Flex course and recommend it for any motivated person who wants to update their analytics skill set in a remote learning environment. The operative term is MOTIVATED. You have to self-discipline and motivation to get through the program because you are not learning in a class where you can ask instructors questions in real time and it’s much easier to fall off of the face of the Earth in an online format. If you aren’t a self-starter and have the will power to keep yourself on task, you won’t make it through.
As a former college professor who has taught both in person and online, I have been on the both sides of the learning experience and prefer in person courses because they are more conducive to higher quality learning. But, I was not in a position to enroll in a bootcamp in person nor was I in a position to take a full time course for 12 weeks. Thinkful was appealing for three reasons: it provided you with a mentor who was a senior data scientist and you would meet twice a week during the course, it provided a lot of other online support like virtual office hours with other senior data scientists and Slack channels with technical coaching support, and it was part-time with a flexible schedule.
On balance, I had a great experience and learned a ton. The mentor program is its strongest feature because with a good mentor you have someone whom you can regularly ask questions about anything related to what you are doing in the course (including career advice). Your mentor also keep you on schedule for two reasons: 1) you don’t want to waste their time, and 2) they can help get out of ruts when you are struggling with projects. My mentor was outstanding and helped me a lot. My biggest problem was often with syntax and python basics that I would forget and they always provided helpful code.
The material is text-based with examples and walkthroughs. They don’t provide lectures or seminars. You must be someone who learns by reading and doing to master the material. I am one of those people, but you may not be. If you prefer video instruction, you may not get as much out of the program. I, along with other students I was in touch with throughout the course went to YouTube for extra guidance or alternative explanations to help clarify some things. Be prepared, however, to do extra reading on your own on a regular basis. I think that you’ll probably do that in any bootcamp course you take.
You pay around $8,000 for six months in the program with 42 days of pause time. Once you sign up, you get a customized schedule with deadlines to help keep you on pace. Pause time allows you to temporarily stop the schedule for a period of time and push your deadlines back in case you are behind, work gets crazy, or you need to break to clear your head.
Other strengths:
Most of the material (80-85%) was accessible and focused on showing you how to apply what you’re learning. They provided enough theoretical and conceptual material so you got the big idea, but the highest quality materials made code accessible to newbies.
Technical coaching support was always great. Coaches are patient and stick with you until the problem is solved, regardless of how long it takes to figure things out.
Online office hours and other support: Mentors holding office hours were always outstanding and very helpful.
“Pause time”: they give you 42 days of “pause time,” where you can pause your timeline and get deadlines pushed back. You might get behind at some point and this is your option to
Administration: you get an Academic Success Manager who acts like a counselor throughout the course and is there for help related to anything but data-science specific issues. ASMs were always pretty good about supporting you through tough times that were outside of your control. For example, people got extra pause time during the pandemic.
You choose a specialty at the end where you dig a little deeper on a topic of your interest and that serves as the basis for your final capstone project. This is something for you and your mentor to figure out together.
Career Support: You get six months with a career coach to help you find a job, but they require a lot of work. I can’t say more since I am just entering that phase.
Weaknesses
Some of the material was not so clear. You would occasionally come across a subsection where the concept was not broken down very well or the code explanation was glib and you needed to do a lot of outside reading to figure things out. Or, the explanations about the concept and code were both pretty shallow yet there was a big leap between that and what you were required to do for the accompanying assignment. That didn’t happen often, but did so occasionally. Unfortunately for me, I specialized in NLP and the material was incomplete, requiring me to do read a lot of extra material to bring me up to speed. This caused me to take longer than I wanted to for the final project. It worked out OK in the end, but this was pretty frustrating. From my own discussions with other students, this does was not the case with other specialization modules, thankfully. |
