Bootcamp - Week Two Down
in Metis
I have completed Week Two of the Metis Bootcamp!
I vaguely remember the concept of sleep. It’s like an old friend I’ll have to visit again once the Bootcamp concludes.
It’s one thing to look at a curriculum and see Web Scraping and say, “Oh yeah… I know how to do that”. It’s a completely different thing to rush through a project where you first have to dream up WHAT to explore, then HOW to find the related data on the Web and finally to pull together some mechanism to do so in short order.
In essence, there’s a significant difference between any project you may have done in the past which spanned several weeks and one where you’re under terrible pressure to do it all very quickly.
Project One is pretty much the only project where you are even barely spoon fed. The instructors don’t tell you exactly where to go and what to do (well… that’s not entirely true… they do… but only you’ve after done it… which is hilarious). But the requirements for Project One fairly strongly push you in a certain direction and you end up working from a small set of sources for your data. None of that is true for the rest of the Bootcamp. You are given structure only in the sense of what methods need to be employed. But dreaming up what to study is on you. This is entirely on purpose since this is a rather valuable facet of being a Data Scientist. Can you determine what to study in order to drive towards a desired goal? Or do you have to be spoon fed what to do?
But knowing this doesn’t make it any easier. It’s rather difficult.
I had a lot of fun this past week with Pair Programming. I think part of it is that we’re all getting to know one another better. So there’s less of the typical sense of guardedness or competition or fear of looking foolish. Another piece of the puzzle may be that we’re all so overwhelmed or exhausted that if anyone can drive things towards the goal, we’re happy no matter who drives.
Project Two is actually entirely solo. But it does fall in line with my earlier assessment that the projects overall trend from group to solo. So, Project Two is solo… but… we’ve all been paired with a “buddy”. The instructors waited till folk had chosen their focus of study in order to pair people up based on topic. I have no idea how well this functions for most cohorts, but for our cohort it sort of magically worked out because we really did end up with many people chasing similar topics. We’re supposed to be an aid or a cheerleader to our buddy. We’ve been given explicit instruction that whenever we hit a roadblock we go to our buddy first before hitting up the instructors.
This helps. But I’ve actually been learning lots of little things from everyone. I did follow my buddy (Nate) in dumping data to a text file first before anything else. Easy to see. Easy to pull into pandas in a Jupyter notebook for more experimentation. Sure I want a more robust mechanism. But, do that later. I have also been intrigued by those who chose topics I discarded because I couldn’t quickly determine how to look up data to scrape. One trick appears to be just to tack on “database” after the topic in a typical web search.
In week two, we actually got a decent amount of instruction related to how to do Project Two before or during the execution of the project. For so much of this, there still remains a lot more we have to figure out beyond that. Furthermore, the various challenges we face depends a lot of what we’re actually tackling.
Also, in week two we started with workshops and meetings with Career Services. For many of us, our first contacts with Metis involved the Program Manager, Nathan. When you start doing “things” with Metis, you deal with Nathan for pretty much any particular event. And, as you might imagine, the Program Manager is our interface to all sorts of logistics, such as when anyone gets stuck in the elevator or the heating in the building doesn’t quite seem to be working. But I must say even if Ashley never gave a lecture or met with me personally, it only takes couple of weeks of being in the same work space to realize that woman works hard. Though things may change in the future Nathan and Ashley have a sort of open office arrangement. And due to the arrangement of rooms, their desks are in between the lecture room and the restrooms. So we can hear Ashley hard at work. And we can easily imagine that’ll be us on the other end of that phone in a few months.
A lot of what Career Services is providing is stuff I’ve heard before since this is sort of my third round through these sorts of agencies. Nonetheless, it’s good to get it tailored a bit towards this specific industry.
Oh… another thought I’ll toss in here before I wrap up this week’s summary. Our TA Ibrahim was in on Friday. We had some interesting discussions with him. A lot of us really don’t yet have a good feel for this industry. Ask me the major telecom companies and I can rattle them off. I cannot yet do that for Data Science. We queried Ibrahim for stuff like that. But even more interesting was when someone pressed him to contrast his experience in his Masters Porgram with the Bootcamp. See… Ibrahim is a relatively recent grad of the Metis Bootcamp himself. He snuck the Bootcamp in between the years of his Masters program in, I believe, Statistics. Ibrahim stated he wanted to do the Bootcamp to help him build his portfolio because he couldn’t easily use his projects at school to do the same (due to restrictions, NDAs, etc.). I found this fascinating given how hard it is to assess the benefit of having a portfolio.
I realize one can never really be sure of everything… you know… Plato’s cave and all that. But, if I needed little tidbits to help me feel better about my reasons for jumping into the Bootcamp (as expensive as it is), I have several:
- Ibrahim stepping “down” from a Masters in Statistics into the Metis Bootcamp to build up his portfolio.
- Adam, who as a Data Science Recruiter decided he didn’t just want to help Data Science folk get a job. He wanted to go and become a Data Scientist.
- Dean, whose wife is a recent graduate of the Metis Bootcamp (and who deleted her Project One work so he couldn’t copy it… chuckle…). I mean, as a couple, they decided after paying for one of them to pay for the other.