Wait, your category (ii) is surely exactly what we care about here.

Yes, I see how my last message was ambiguous.

What I had in mind in bringing up category (ii) is that we've had some students who had a priori worse near term employment prospects relative to the usual range of bootcamp attendees, who are better positions than they had been and who got what they were looking to get from the program, while not yet having $100k+ paying jobs. And most students who would have gotten $100k+ paying jobs even if they hadn't attended appear to have benefited from attending the program.

The nature of the value that we have to add is very much specific to the student.

Hello! I'm a cofounder of Signal Data Science.

Because our students have come into the program from very heterogeneous backgrounds (ranging from high school dropout to math PhD with years of experience as a software engineer), summary statistics along the lines that you're looking for are less informative than might seem to be the case prima facie. In particular, we don't yet have meaningfully large sample of students who don't fall into one of the categories of (i) people who would have gotten high paying jobs anyway and (ii) people who one wouldn't expect to have gotten high paying jobs by now, based on their backgrounds.

If you're interested in the possibility of attending the program, we encourage you to fill out our short application form. If it seems like it might be a good fit for you, we'd be happy to provide detailed answers to any questions that you might have about job placement.

Yes, that was supposed to be June 24th! We have a third one from July 5th – August 24th. There are still spaces in the program if you're interested in attending.

Thanks for the written feedback (which adds to what I had gleaned in person).

There were actually multiple times during the first couple weeks when I (or my partner and I) would spend 4+ hours trying to fix one particular line of code, and Jonah would give big-picture answers about e.g. how linear regression worked in theory, when what I'd asked for were specific suggestions on how to fix that line of code. This led me to giving up on asking Jonah for help after long enough.

I think that what happened here is me having misunderstood what you were asking for, rather than any disinclination on my part to help you with individual lines of code. I will take this feedback into account.

Intermediate and advanced SQL, practice of certain social skills (e.g. handshakes, being interested in your interviewer, and other interview-relevant social skills), and possibly nonlinear models.

This is helpful detail regarding what you were looking for. Which topics would you have preferred to have been been dropped in favor of these?

Hi Toggle,

Thanks for your question!

Most of our students have just started looking for jobs over the past ~2 weeks, and the job search process in the tech sector typically takes ~2 months, from sending out resumes to accepting offers (see, e.g. "Managing your time" in Alexei's post Maximizing Your Donations via a Job).

The feedback loop here is correspondingly longer than we'd like. We expect to have an answer to your question by the time we advertise our third cohort.

Thanks for your interest! Some responses below.

Do you require applicants to have a graduate degree?

No degree is required. We're selecting on ability rather than on credentials.

Zipfian Academy, App Academy, and other bootcamps are 12 weeks long, and (the first instance of) this one is only 6 weeks long. Why is this, and what are you cutting out relative to other data science bootcamps to make it this short? (This is my most pressing question).

1. Based on the preliminary interest that people have expressed anticipate that the students in our first cohort will be significantly stronger than is typical of data science bootcamps, and will correspondingly be able to cover the material at an accelerated pace. We expect at least some of our cohorts to run a full 12 weeks.

2. Regarding the comparison with coding bootcamps, there are reasons to believe that the amount that somebody needs to know to be in the top x% of industry data scientists is less than the amount that's needed to be in the top x% of programmers. (I can elaborate.)

3. We're cutting out some of the more advanced machine learning algorithms, which industry data scientists use infrequently enough so that they can be a distraction from getting started.

As a tie-in to my last question, is there a hiring event which employers will be invited to around the end of the program?

Very few bootcamp students who I know got their jobs through this route, so we may or may not do this depend on how efficient it is relative to other routes. Like other bootcamps that offer the "pay later" model, we have a large stake in ensuring that our students find jobs.

Do you know which language(s) you'll be using?

We'll be working primarily in R, and teaching SQL as well.

Yes, we'll definitely be covering this.

Thanks for the suggestion. That would be wonderful. We'll definitely think about this – it's a matter of whether we can create a sufficiently simple presentation of the material so that the marginal returns per unit time are high for the student population that we'll be working with.