In the name of love (for Data Science)

Over the course of 6 months, a group of professionals just trained and certified 7 people as entry level data scientists on an entirely volunteer basis.

This is a big deal!

The whole gang at the kickoff event

Why is this such a big deal

The Lisbon Data Science Starters Academy was bootstrapped with 150 euros and a whole lot of love for our field. We had 15 volunteers working together on a mostly remote basis preparing and delivering course material to a group of students who chose to spend a non-trivial amount of their free time studying and learning about data science. Furthermore, this was extremely accessible! Thanks to our wonderful partners and hackathon hosts we were able to control our costs, as well as expand the network to some of the coolest companies in town.

Think about this for a moment! With a few hundred euros and while continuing to focus on primary commitments such as work, school, and family, you can become an entry level practitioner in one of the most rewarding professions available today! With every new data scientist available in the workforce, opportunities to apply the discipline to a diverse range of areas that sorely need it are opened up. Governance, journalism, biology, chemistry, medicine, social good, gaming… If you have data you can benefit from data science.

The volunteers that got the Academy off the ground. Many more joined later and helped along the way!

So what exactly is the Academy?

It is a hybrid, long-term bootcamp. Students spend the majority of their academy time studying, communicating, and asking questions remotely over Slack while getting together for a hackathon once per month. Specifically, it went like this:

• One 3 day kickoff event that consisted of two intensive training days and one hackathon.

• 5 months, each of which followed a theme and had a hackathon on the last Sunday of each month. The themes were binary classification, time series, recommender systems, NLP, data wrangling, and model deployment.
• The last hackathon was a capstone project in which the students trained a model, wrote a report with EDA findings, and deployed their model behind an HTTP server while a simulator sent observations to their models over the course of 3 weeks.

The graduates are the ones that completed the capstone project and passed a 5 person grading committee. There are currently about 5 students doing round two of the capstone because of scheduling conflicts with the deadlines so we might end up with 12 graduates!

Hackathon at the Wodify Lisbon office

The good, the bad, and the ugly

So a group of 16 working professionals came together to develop and deliver a non-trivial curriculum over the course of 7 months. Here’s the material that we covered in the first two days:

Curriculum 2017

So nothing can go wrong, right? Wrong! There were definitely bugs to accompany all the fun. Let’s do a quick retrospective.

The good (some of it anyway)

• 7 new Data Scientists were born!
• Collaboration! People really helped each other a lot. Anytime something needed to get done or someone had a question, an effort was made.
• We covered a lot of material…
• The hackathons were fun — we got to see some really cool offices of the hosts.
• A lot of people met and worked together that normally wouldn’t have. It’s one thing to hang out at a meetup and it’s a completely different thing working toward something together.

The bad (some of it anyway)

• The 12 hour hackathons schedule was a bit packed. 12 hours for 7 teams to do EDA, train a model, write a report, and give the report was a bit much if preparation hadn’t been flawless.
• The learning material each month was not properly incentivized. They were ungraded and could be consumed passively without having to get your hands dirty.
• Low graduation rate. Depending on who finishes this round of the academy, the highest graduation rate we can expect is 25%.

The Ugly

• Only 4 female participants. Diversity is a big topic among the volunteers and we’ve summoned our network of advisors to help us tackle this issue.

We are working hard on all of these issues and are committed to making improvements in the upcoming Batches. Stay tuned for another blog post about how we tackle these issues and what the results were.

Wrapping things up

Speaking personally, this was an amazing experience. I got to know a lot of professionals both in and out of my field. I hope to get to know many more and be part of a community that is stronger because we spend quality time learning things together.

I now have a whole new group of people to work, learn, and solve problems with and it just feels really good. The future looks bright :-)

What next?

We will be announcing the Batch 2 application opening date within a week. Participants should plan to spend 10 hours per week on average for the Academy. There will be 50 slots open. Applications are accepted on a first come, first serve basis, so subscribe to our mailing list if you want to get notified a day earlier than the official announcement.

Can’t wait for next time!