Project Kojak Begins
We’re finally here… we’ve crossed into Passion Project territory.
And… in many ways, it’s just like the previous projects. We’ve got till Friday to post our two project ideas on projects slack channel. We need to try to “fail fast” and switch to the alternative idea if the first one proves not to be viable.
But there are many rather significant differences this time. First of all, there’s next to no guidance or restrictions. Unlike the previous projects, there’s no focus on Supervised vs. Unsupervised. There’s no requirement to use SQL or NoSQL. No goal to incorporate visualizations. Instead, it’s all of the above in whatever way we want.
Except…
The instructors are very actively involved in helping us choose projects. This is in two primary forms. First, they would like to create some sort of balance across the cohort. For Project Four, David made the comment that he’d very rarely, if ever, seen word clouds in project presentations. However for some odd reason, a large percentage of us included word clouds. They were artfully done. But as a whole cohort it was essentially overdone. They don’t want half of us chasing the same topic, area or toolset for Project 5. So, they listed about a dozen general areas and suggested to us those which might appear more to employers.
Ah yes… employers. For Project 4 we had to hold a microphone while presenting. It was weird. This was to prepare us because Project 5 presentations will be livestreamed. The primary audience for Project 5 presentations will be employers and recruiters, both present and remote.
So… if feels the instructors are even more rigorous in helping us avoid “bad” projects. Our ideas are getting shot down quickly. If our ideas involve circular logic, weak assumptions, untenable goals, etc., we’re redirected accordingly.
Finally, it would seem we have more time for this final project. But that’s all somewhat of an illusion. This first week is devoted to helping us choose a project (two projects, actually - we need a viable alternative as well). And the last week is earmarked for presentation refinement. Oh yes. There absolutely WILL NOT be any presentations given on Career Day that were actually tossed together or wrapped up within twelve hours of the presentation. Oh no no no. We’ll be presenting internally a full week ahead of time and going through several iterations for refinement.
That puts much more pressure on us overall.
I finally selected an alternative yesterday afternoon and posted my two ideas. I’ve been moving large amounts of data into an AWS S3 bucket for the purpose of EDA. So, I’ve begun. But my focus will be split for a few days as I prepare the final Investigation.
It seems I wasn’t the only one hoping to postpone delivery/presentation of the final Investigation. I thought I was “safe” in this since I had the last slot on the official schedule. But that means little when about half the cohort was trying to push this off as well. Alice was quite lenient in granting these postponement requests. But it now appears there was something missed in interpretation. The students meant postponements on the order of a week (I’d’ve preferred a month). She probably meant something like a day tops. So Alice laid down the law and declared ALL Investigation presentations must be completed by Monday. This is creating a traffic jam and we’ll have something like a Project Presentation Day because so many of us will be giving these Investigations back-to-back.
Her motive is clear. She wants us focused on Project Five. And I see why. I’m having lots of fun with my Investigation. It really is now a competing focus.