How to succeed as a self-taught learner in data science.

Being a self-taught learner myself, I had to make a lot of efforts to find effective techniques and strategies for learning new skills and concepts within the field of data science. The result of my research are these following simple but powerful strategies to learn more efficiently which is key for anyone with a busy life and responsibilities. Some of those strategies will be known to you but still relevant and others less known or intuitive.
Practice testing
Practice testing consists of trying to recall from memory the key concepts or answers from a previously read material without looking at the content.
As an example, we can take two budding data scientists trying to learn the syntax of a programming language with the help of a book. One reads the chapter then re-read it again to try and absorb the information, the other one reads the chapter, closes the book and try to recall the information, either by saying it out loud or by actually writing or typing the code he is trying to learn. The second data scientist is improving her long-term memory and will likely understand and retain more than the first programmer.
The correct recall of information has a significant impact on memory. The incorrect recall, on the other hand, enables the learner to be aware of what she knows and where she needs to study again and thus makes a better decision on what needs to be reviewed.
We should continue testing ourselves until we correctly recall each concept at least once from memory.
Distributed practice
The second method is distributed practice, it consists of practice distributed across time. Taking the same example of the two budding data scientists, the distributed practice would be that one data scientist studies many chapters in one sitting and start an important project requiring the knowledge contained in those chapters the next day. The other data scientist would review her notes of the chapters for shorter sessions several days before the start of the project. That would enable her to retain much more and remember the content even beyond the time frame of the project.
Summarisation
The last method is summarising and simply consist of rewriting in our own words or paraphrasing the most important ideas within a text.
Note Taking
Note taking has been an important skill to record information and learn about a subject since the antiquity. The mental processes at work while taking note are amazing and complex. It involves receiving and filtering information and restructuring it in order to take the essence of what has been said, explained or read. It has been found that note-taking ( in a classroom environment) is cognitively comparable to playing chess. Here are a few tips for efficient note-taking.
- Do not transcribe but write in your own words
- Review your notes the same day you created them and then on a regular basis, rather than cramming review into one long study session (distributed practice).
- Think carefully about how to take notes, whether typing or with pen and paper. There is evidence showing that writing on pen and paper is more effective for retention and does not encourage to write everything verbatim.
- Use Jupyter notebooks to be able to run code and write notes in markdown to have a truly interactive and intuitive note taking experience. This is much more effective than passively writing since you are seeing the results of the code you enter and can share and improve the notebook over time.
The Pomodoro technique
“Pomodoro” is Italian for tomato. The technique works by getting you to structure your work in 25-minute sessions, each separated by a short break.
You have to set a timer to 25 minutes, work on the task until the timer rings, when it does put a check mark on a paper, then take a short break of 5 minutes. Every 4 session you should take a long break of about 20 minutes to allow your brain to assimilate the new information and rest.
The break time should be spent doing something else like taking a walk, having a coffee and getting a snack, preferably not seated.
One of the advantages of this technique is its flexibility, you can easily modulate the time to suit your style and go for more than 25 minutes of study after a while when you get more stamina. It can also be a way to a measure of how much time and effort an activity takes in terms of the number of “Pomodoros” that it takes.
Sleep
The importance of sleep cannot be stressed enough. Most of the learning is consolidated during sleep. We should sleep at least 7 hours a night.
Another reason why sleep is so important is that research has shown that a process of self-cleaning occurs in the brain when we are sleeping. The brain is clearing out all the toxins that have accumulated during the day as a result of mental activity and those toxins are harmful.
I hope these techniques and strategies will help you learn better and faster.
Happy learning!
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