Spoiler alert: It was surprisingly easy (and free) to make — Getting a Data Scientist job is hard. This isn’t 2015 anymore: it’s not enough to know a few pandas functions and put the words “Big Data” on your résumé. Competition for the top jobs is fierce. On a recent trawl through the LinkedIn jobs board, I struggled to find a…

Forget train_test_split: Pipeline, ColumnTransformer, FeatureUnion and FunctionTransformer are indispensable even if you use XGBoost or LGBM — Data preparation is famously the least-loved aspect of Data Science. If done right, however, it needn’t be such a headache. While scikit-learn has fallen out of vogue as a modelling library in recent years given the meteoric rise of PyTorch, LightGBM, and XGBoost, it’s still easily one of the best…

How I approached the balancing act of (1) enjoying my degree and (2) setting myself up for life after university in “the real world” — It was March 2021, and I’d just received an email which was about to change the course of my life. “I am writing to inform you that we would like to make you an offer for 2021 entry to the University of Oxford.” I think I squealed a little. Or…

Interactive coding courses are great, but (by design) they’ll only get you so far. Here’s how to maximise their potential while overcoming their limitations — I started my first online coding course in 2019. I still haven’t finished it. The course was one which promised to teach you Python through building real-world apps. I loved the course, but it wasn’t particularly focused on Data Science use cases of Python, and before long I’d ditched it.

No, I don’t just ask ChatGPT to tell me — Data Science moves fast. Like, really fast. Five years ago, if you said you were interested in AI that roughly translated to something between having a PhD in Quantum Mathematics and having an “I heart π” tattoo plastered across your back. Now my mum sends me ChatGPT memes and you…

Forget Titanic and MNIST: Pick a unique project that builds your skills and helps you stand out from the crowd — If you’re trying to build a career in Data Science, side-projects are a surefire way to demonstrate your skills and boost your chances of getting a job or promotion. In 2023, however, it’s no longer enough to knock out a Titanic survival predictor or MNIST digit classifier. Projects like these…

AI is great at answering questions it is asked, not posing questions never before voiced [1] — Are current state-of-the-art AI systems creative? Based on the state of my social feeds, it certainly seems like it. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t see some incredible new “creative” feat achieved by an AI system like Bard, ChatGPT, or GPT-4. This apparent creativity is driving unprecedented public…

Hold fire with your Pinterest board: is going back to uni the right move for you? — In recent years, the number of Data Science-related master’s programs has exploded. According to FindAMasters.com [1], universities around the world currently offer a total of more than 3,500 master’s degrees related to Data Science and AI. Clearly, there is a lot of demand, and universities are experts at tapping it…

Spoiler: Kaggle wasn’t one of them — Over the last 3 years, I have changed careers from working in Project Management/Data Analysis to becoming a Data Scientist. In this article, I’m going to talk about 11 things that helped me make this transition and get my first Data Scientist job. There’s no way to sugarcoat it: getting…