Data Science Exploration with Bertelsmann Scholarship Program by Udacity.

It is almost impossible today to imagine any business that does not include Data_Science Utilization and it is also of high value for schools to equip its students with adequate skills needed to effectively utilize the company data.

The first phase of the scholarship program organized by Udacity for learners of Data_Science effectively covered important skill sets needed to successfully work with a huge data set.

It consisted of three important parts:

First being the introduction to the world of Statistics which I found highly informative and adeptly organized to make it easy for learners to apprehend with no difficulty and also this part of the program was my favorite since it gave all the important information needed in my current and further studies. The way information and formulas presented to master Statistics really had my appreciation since I had studied Statistics before but I used to get clumsy over the intricate parts of it but once I went through this part of the program, it became so much clear for me. It is pretty much obvious for other learners as well that mastering statistics would naturally open comprehension of how data can be organized and made use of to make better decisions in the business world whether you are working in a small company or have a business of your own.

Second part of the program covered the introduction to Python which a very powerful tool needed to work with data. It contained information mainly on the following areas

• fundamentals of the Python programming language, along with programming best practices.
• to represent and store data using Python data types and variables.
• to use conditionals and loops to control the flow of your programs.
• to harness the power of complex data structures like lists, sets, dictionaries, and tuples to store collections of related data.
• to define and document your own custom functions, write scripts, and handle errors.
• to find and use modules in the Python Standard Library and other third-party libraries.

Since it covered the very basics of the program and mostly guided me on how can I utilize this language to work with data, it itself did not cover much information outside that scope. Moreover, I believe this part of the program played an important role for those who barely knew anything about coding or Python and successfully guided them on how to master Python to work with data.

Last but not least, we were introduced one of the mostly used tools in the world of data science, SQL for mainly following purposes

• to use Structured Query Language (SQL) to extract and analyze data stored in databases.
• to extract data, join tables together, and perform aggregations.
• to do more complex analysis and manipulations using subqueries, temp tables, and window functions.
• to write efficient SQL queries to successfully handle a variety of data analysis tasks.

Those skills could make any learner capable of manipulating any data set to make more educated decisions.

The main problem for the huge MOOCs out there today is the very less percentage of the students who registered for the course going till the end of the course, finally completing it and you can find more information in this link by Course Central.

I found in the Udacity course that this problem if very efficiently fought by providing the students any community they need. A case in point being the Slack communities to pose a variety of questions you might have coming during the completion of the course and the Facebook group to check how other students are progressing throughout the course. I myself was highly impressed by how hard so many other learners were studying, organizing group meetups in their own countries and this, in case, encouraged me complete the course as soon as I can. This program not only gave me information on data science but rather how the world of education is changing rapidly. It is not the world today that you go to school for a number of years and work in that field for a extended period of time, today you can learn anything you want in any part of your life and to be better in what you do, you are to consistently explore the education world and Udacity is perfectly providing this environment for passionate learners.

Happy learning for the rest of the course students!