Comment author:Fluttershy
09 April 2016 10:33:36AM
8 points
[-]
Avoid this program.
Jonah and Robert have good intentions, and I was actually happy with the weekly interview sessions taught by Robert. However, I had a poor experience with this program overall. I'll list some observations from my experience as a member of the first cohort below.
First, this program is effectively self-directed; most of the time, neither the TA nor the instructor were available. When they were, asking them questions was incredibly difficult due to their lack of familiarity with the material they were supposed to be teaching. To be sure, both the instructor and the TA were intelligent people--the problem was just that they knew lots of math, but not very much data science.
Second, there were lots of communication issues between the instructors and the students. I really do not want to give specific examples, since I don't want to say something that would reflect so poorly on the LessWrong community. However, I assure you that this was an incredibly large issue.
Lastly, everything about this program was disorganized. Several of us paid for housing through the program, which ended up not being available as soon as we'd been told that it would be. The furniture in the office space we used was set up by participants because Signal was too disorganized to have it set up before we were supposed to start using it. The fact that only two out of twelve students pair programmed together on an average day was also due to a lack of organization of the part of the instructors.
Jonah and Robert clearly worked very hard to make this program what it was, but attending was still a bad experience for me. If you already have a background in software engineering and want to pay $8,000 to teach yourself data science alongside other students who are doing the same, this program is a good fit for you. Otherwise, consider attending a longer, more established program, like Zipfian Academy that actually uses pair programming and has instructors available to answer questions.
Comment author:gmachine
10 April 2016 03:37:05AM
3 points
[-]
Yet another student reporting in with a highly positive experience!
I personally felt Jonah knew data science really well. In addition to solid theoretical understanding of the mathematics, he was extremely proficient with using R and statistics to dissect and analyze complex real world data sets. At the beginning, he provided virtually step by step guidance on analysis and interpretation of several data sets using a variety of techniques and packages in R. The program only became more self-directed over time because the students, with diverse backgrounds and experiences, focused on different areas and progressed at different rates. Even then, I felt Jonah was very actively providing individually tailored guidance for the students on their learning and projects.
If you have strong fundamentals and are capable of getting up to speed on R quickly, then you can get a lot out of this program as I did. It provided me the basic knowledge and practice on using programming/statistics/machine learning to find patterns in real world data and make useful, meaningful statistical predictions from them. After this program, I know more or less how to approach data science, work independently, and fill whatever gaps I have. I would highly recommend this program to a self-motivated, mathematically minded person looking for a job in data science.
A lot of us came in with very different levels of knowledge and a big factor that determined success was whether or not you had experience with programming beforehand. To be fair a lot of non-programmers ended up being stars, like the student who made the word cloud, but they had to work a lot harder.
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Avoid this program.
Jonah and Robert have good intentions, and I was actually happy with the weekly interview sessions taught by Robert. However, I had a poor experience with this program overall. I'll list some observations from my experience as a member of the first cohort below.
First, this program is effectively self-directed; most of the time, neither the TA nor the instructor were available. When they were, asking them questions was incredibly difficult due to their lack of familiarity with the material they were supposed to be teaching. To be sure, both the instructor and the TA were intelligent people--the problem was just that they knew lots of math, but not very much data science.
Second, there were lots of communication issues between the instructors and the students. I really do not want to give specific examples, since I don't want to say something that would reflect so poorly on the LessWrong community. However, I assure you that this was an incredibly large issue.
Lastly, everything about this program was disorganized. Several of us paid for housing through the program, which ended up not being available as soon as we'd been told that it would be. The furniture in the office space we used was set up by participants because Signal was too disorganized to have it set up before we were supposed to start using it. The fact that only two out of twelve students pair programmed together on an average day was also due to a lack of organization of the part of the instructors.
Jonah and Robert clearly worked very hard to make this program what it was, but attending was still a bad experience for me. If you already have a background in software engineering and want to pay $8,000 to teach yourself data science alongside other students who are doing the same, this program is a good fit for you. Otherwise, consider attending a longer, more established program, like Zipfian Academy that actually uses pair programming and has instructors available to answer questions.
Yet another student reporting in with a highly positive experience!
I personally felt Jonah knew data science really well. In addition to solid theoretical understanding of the mathematics, he was extremely proficient with using R and statistics to dissect and analyze complex real world data sets. At the beginning, he provided virtually step by step guidance on analysis and interpretation of several data sets using a variety of techniques and packages in R. The program only became more self-directed over time because the students, with diverse backgrounds and experiences, focused on different areas and progressed at different rates. Even then, I felt Jonah was very actively providing individually tailored guidance for the students on their learning and projects.
If you have strong fundamentals and are capable of getting up to speed on R quickly, then you can get a lot out of this program as I did. It provided me the basic knowledge and practice on using programming/statistics/machine learning to find patterns in real world data and make useful, meaningful statistical predictions from them. After this program, I know more or less how to approach data science, work independently, and fill whatever gaps I have. I would highly recommend this program to a self-motivated, mathematically minded person looking for a job in data science.
A lot of us came in with very different levels of knowledge and a big factor that determined success was whether or not you had experience with programming beforehand. To be fair a lot of non-programmers ended up being stars, like the student who made the word cloud, but they had to work a lot harder.