=~Halfway through my Data Science Boot Camp
At just around the mid-point check in of my 12 Week General Assembly Boot Camp and I at least have gone from the Full Metal Jacket stage to feeling at least somewhat like the soon to be successful West Point cadets Angela Duckworth described in one of my favorite recent reads GRIT.
After the initial feeling like I was clinging to a life preserver I’m happy to report now I feel like I’m on track to doggy paddle my way to the shores of tech job having. Without much of a Python background beyond making Knights who Say Ni references I had taught myself enough to pass the admission test for General Assembly.
After a day long mini boot camp that somehow raised even more questions for me, I started the best way to do anything — Just Doing It. With a 9 year old Gatorade commercial and even older Juelz Santana song as my inspirational soundtrack I began to apply my perseverance and perspiration to dealing with Syntax error messages and not recreational sports like I used to.
It was refreshing to return to an academic atmosphere, one with helpful and extremely intelligent instructors, an energized and diverse student population, and even a snack day! Also refreshingly life saving was that returning to an academic setting and my old learning styles still could transfer to a completely different field — analogies and study guides!
Python dictionaries became baseball card binders and plastic sheet protectors, functions became robot waitresses whose parameters are hamburger degree of doneness(straight up medium, always, btw) and type of cheese, and absolute and relative paths became stages of passes on a basketball possession for learning new things purposes, and a bunch of other analogies made possible by the things ingrained into me since childhood. A lot of the linear regression and statistics knowledge from my old college courses were stuck in the back of my brain somewhere, so for once regression led to some progression. For everything else the Jaylen Brown might-be-corny-if-I-also-didn’t-love-basketball-so-much quote of Faith Consistency and Hard Work Paying Off as long as I put in the hours outside of class creating study guide after study guide.
Trying to hit the ground running resulted in having to get myself right back up a few times, but trusting the process is yielding enough results like it did with Philly getting Embiid and Simmons, and happy to report that the grit Angela Duckworth wrote so compassionately about in her book IS working.
My first finished project taught me about data cleaning, induced reason through analysis, matplotlib formatting, and how many states in the US have anemic SAT Participation rates.
My second finished project taught me even MORE about data cleaning, creating interaction terms in a data set, using linear regression to estimate housing prices in Ames, Iowa, and how to scale back humor in a business presentation.
=~Half way through and now I would be able to off the top of my head list the most common data types using in Python and how to properly define a function among other things, plus the very important skill set of utilizing the internet to help me write working code. The exponentially increasing difficulty of the last half of the course may be coming, but my confidence interval is rising and rising that come this fall I may soon be one of the rare types of Millennial outliers: one with a fulfilling job.
