What I Wish I Knew Before Learning Data Science
I’m about at the end of my data science bootcamp at Flatiron School, and while it’s been a wonderful and challenging experience, I’d like to share a few things that I feel may have made the process go smoother and easier for me.
If you don’t want to end up looking like the guy in this picture (like I did through most of this program), you’re going to want to be managing your time efficiently. Yes, go out to that restaurant, go see your favorite artist at their show in your town, hit the gym consistently throughout the week, but don’t neglect the work you need to get done! I personally found myself drowning in work constantly at the end of modules because I wasn’t managing my time well and staying ahead of things I needed to get done.
You, entering a field you have no experience in, are extremely likely to, well, not know anything. Lay that pride aside, ask for help! I wish I had known how friendly my cohort mates and instructors were and how excited and willing they were to teach and assist us with any tasks we tackled. Many problems I tried to solve myself and hours spent frustrated at my computer could have been avoided if I had gone to someone who was able to help me. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t try to figure things out on your own, but it’s better to ask someone for help than sit staring at your Mac for 45 minutes stumped!
Prioritze the basics first! When you get on to machine learning, you’ll be using the stuff you learned in the beginning. Cleaning data effectively, using loops, creating functions, syntax, etc. Hammering down the building blocks of code within Python will make it much easier to flow and work effectively and efficiently in larger projects later on. I didn’t dedicate as much time as I would have liked to mastering the basic things in Python and I paid that time later on with more going on in terms of volume.
On that note, make sure you go out of your way to find and utilize resources at your disposal. Especially at Flatiron, you have loads of information and individuals who love to teach willing to nudge you in the right direction. There will be times when you feel that you aren’t understanding something, that you just can’t get the hang of it, or maybe you’ll be stuck up on that one line of code that always throws you errors. Sometimes, hearing someone give you a different perspective that you may not have considered will be enlightening. Learning different solutions to problems and different trains of thought en route to those solutions will mold you into not only a stronger coder but a more versatile thinker as well.
If you are someone considering a bootcamp, a career in computer science, or just an enthusiast, I hope some of the things I wish I had known learning data science will help you, too. Happy learning!
