Alternatively:
1. Take Coursera's excellent Intro to Data Science for free
2. Spend time doing Kaggle competitions and learning along the way
3. Profit
New online master's degree to train the data scientists of tomorrow
11–20 of 53 posts
Re: New online master's degree to train the data scientists of tomorrow
#12>> The program will cost $60,000, which school officials >> said compares favorably with other professional degree >> programs. Entry-level data scientists in the San >> Francisco area can command salaries in the $110,000 to >> $130,000 range. $60,000 is laughable. The justification based on salaries in California is laughable. Unless a relocation package to California from anywhere there is internet is included in t…
The price is ludicrous, especially considering the plethora of high quality free online courses.
I think their pricing may come from the fact that data science is the 'hot' field right now, so I suspect they'll be capitalizing on the corporations that will start pumping money into training their employees in data science. So I wouldn't be surprised if you start seeing some forture 500s covering the cost of this for a new hire.
Re: New online master's degree to train the data scientists of tomorrow
#13Alternatively: 1. Take Coursera's excellent Intro to Data Science for free 2. Spend time doing Kaggle competitions and learning along the way 3. Profit
Kaggle looks really cool. Thanks for this comment introducing me to it. They even have introductory competitions for those not well versed in data science with tutorials on things like python and random trees. Pretty sweet!
Re: New online master's degree to train the data scientists of tomorrow
#14Given the success of well run hacker schools like Dev Bootcamp and Flatiron Schools, I am surprised no one has yet tried to apply that model to training data scientists. It seems like a sector similarly deprived of properly trained talent and also with a similar initial learning curve to develop the basic skill set.
Re: New online master's degree to train the data scientists of tomorrow
#15Alternatively: 1. Take Coursera's excellent Intro to Data Science for free 2. Spend time doing Kaggle competitions and learning along the way 3. Profit
Incidentally Coursera's Intro to Data Science looks/ed to be a trial run for the first of three classes in the UW Data Science certificate program [1]. Each class is a bit over $1k. UW did the same with Intro to Computational Finance and Financial Econometrics.
Re: New online master's degree to train the data scientists of tomorrow
#16Given the success of well run hacker schools like Dev Bootcamp and Flatiron Schools, I am surprised no one has yet tried to apply that model to training data scientists. It seems like a sector similarly deprived of properly trained talent and also with a similar initial learning curve to develop the basic skill set.
"theres a bootcamp for that"
http://zipfianacademy.com/
Re: New online master's degree to train the data scientists of tomorrow
#17While this program seems interesting, valuable, and a step in the right direction, the minute I read the $60,000 price tag I nearly choked on my gum and quickly pressed the back button. Coursera classes for me at least in the near future, hopefully within the next few years these degree programs will scale a little better and costs will plummet.
I was just going to write this exact comment. I am a data scientist, and I do not think the $60,000 price tag is worth it. I might do it for $2,000 or $3,000, but that's already being a little generous.
The $60,000 price tag must come with a guarantee that you'll be making the proposed $110,000 - $130,000 salary range for at least 5 years. Otherwise, wow.
The best way to learn these things is to just dive right in. If one need's human interaction, the community is easily within reach (at a much lower cost).
Maybe one could argue that the "networking" is worth the price tag. Still, I get these "data meetup" emails about 5 times a day, which I could easily go to for networking.
Re: New online master's degree to train the data scientists of tomorrow
#18Given the success of well run hacker schools like Dev Bootcamp and Flatiron Schools, I am surprised no one has yet tried to apply that model to training data scientists. It seems like a sector similarly deprived of properly trained talent and also with a similar initial learning curve to develop the basic skill set.
From what I understand from skimming the site, Dev Bootcamp teaches people RoR and a few other web technologies in 9 weeks. All that tells me is that you know one programming language, it doesn't tell me whether you are a programmer, whether you understand concurrency problems, race conditions, algorithms etc. Sure, this is alright for a lot of programming positions because there are a lot of positions out there that don't need those.
The problem with data science is that it is incredibly hard to teach anyone Linear Algebra, Probability, statistics in 9 weeks. Sure, I can hand wave all that and then teach you a bunch of machine learning algorithms. All you get at the end of it is people who claim they understand it intuitively and don't need the math. Except that mathematical intuition builds up accumulatively.
It is easy to see this in interviews; you can see folks who are really good at drawing pretty pictures to explain say PCA. They have no clue when not to use such a thing. It makes no intuitive sense to them why PCA breaks down when there are outliers. If they can't draw a picture of it, it is difficult for them to comprehend.
Re: New online master's degree to train the data scientists of tomorrow
#19Given the success of well run hacker schools like Dev Bootcamp and Flatiron Schools, I am surprised no one has yet tried to apply that model to training data scientists. It seems like a sector similarly deprived of properly trained talent and also with a similar initial learning curve to develop the basic skill set.
"theres a bootcamp for that" http://zipfianacademy.com/
haha. great reply. I knew it was out there somewhere.
Re: New online master's degree to train the data scientists of tomorrow
#20Given the success of well run hacker schools like Dev Bootcamp and Flatiron Schools, I am surprised no one has yet tried to apply that model to training data scientists. It seems like a sector similarly deprived of properly trained talent and also with a similar initial learning curve to develop the basic skill set.
From what I understand from skimming the site, Dev Bootcamp teaches people RoR and a few other web technologies in 9 weeks. All that tells me is that you know one programming language, it doesn't tell me whether you are a programmer, whether you understand concurrency problems, race conditions, algorithms etc. Sure, this is alright for a lot of programming positions because there are a lot of positions out there that…
thanks for the detailed response. I know very little about the actual application of data science, so it nice to hear the thoughts on the feasibility of this from someone who does. Either way, someone seems to think they can teach it in a bootcamp format, so I am curious to see how they manage.