Reflections on a fantastic Data science course
Earlier this year, I saw an ad on Facebook for the Udacity Bertelsmann Data Science Challenge Scholarship Course. The applications had just opened, so I sent in an application and forgot all about it. Many months later, I woke up one morning to see an email from Udacity saying I had been accepted to the course and that it started soon.
I panicked.
I am no stranger to data and statistics. During graduate school and while writing my dissertation, a large part of my work involved crunching the data and results from my experiments to turn them into graphs and statistics that I could use in journal articles and for my dissertation. My later experience as a healthcare consultant was what made me want more data-wrangling skills. It felt like we could do a lot more with the information we had, if only I knew how to do it! This desire to work more quantitatively and “precisely” by adding data science to my arsenal of analytical methods led me to taking a few classes in Python and coding, and to sending in an application to the Bertelsmann Udacity Data Science course.
The reason I panicked on receiving the acceptance letter was that, in the two weeks before I got the email from Udacity, I had started a full-time job that was supposed to go for three months and started an evening coding class (more on this later). This, coupled with a rambunctious 1.5-year-old toddler meant that I had no idea when I would be able to study for the challenge course.
I’ll save you the suspense, I completed the course a few days ago and am so thrilled I managed to partake in it. Here’s why:
Fifteen thousand people saying “Hello” all at once
“We have seen time and again that the most successful students are those who learn in community, which is why participation is a requirement for Phase 2.”
It was made clear, early on, that progression to the second phase of the scholarship hinged on both completion of the study materials and participation in the “community”. This, frankly, filled me with dread. I’m very much an introvert and have never been much of a group-study sort of person. The initial days of the course only confirmed my suspicions — it felt like I was trying to drink out of a firehose. I’ve taken MOOCs before and tended to steer clear of the forums because they tend to be a) Lots of people introducing themselves ad nauseum, and b) Lots of people who, on the first day of class, were already miraculously on lesson 7 (which can be very demotivating to read!)
The Bertelsmann data science course had a class forum, a Facebook group and finally… Slack. Every time I would log into one, it felt overwhelming. Lots of wonderful enthusiastic people excitedly saying hello to each other. Busy with work, coding classes and baby, I only managed to log on and interact a few times a week but as time passed, a wonderful thing happened. After the initial chaos, channels began to emerge on Slack, with distinct communities and atmospheres and people began to find their tribes. In addition to joining the channel for my geography (Nordic countries), I also joined a channel meant for people who were starting the course late (or studying at a less frenetic pace) and dropped in at other channels on Slack to see what they were like. The most excellent live-help channel, for example, was populated with a floating population of people with questions and people with answers. I got into wonderful side discussions with some of my classmates; other academics, a fellow student who was looking for advice on how to publish a manuscript they had penned, other people in Scandinavia and so on.
The Udacity class forum page was even better! Introductions and resource recommendations and other recurring themes were restricted to single threads. This instantly improved the forums. As you participate in the forum, you receive “badges” on your profile, which almost feels like gamification of community participation — and I must admit, I like it!
Even though I still cannot learn with group study, logging onto Slack, or onto the forums and seeing other students at the same level as me, or slightly behind, or ahead and willing to help, was very encouraging. Much more so than I had anticipated.
I think the Udacity team deserve kudos for turning a normally chaotic and low-reward aspect of MOOCs into something that felt genuine, warm and personable.
“Computing is too important to be left to men.” *
* Karen Sparck Jones, Professor at Cambridge Computer Laboratory
I started a coding class for women called Smart Coding, that ran for three months, every evening, for 2.5 hours, three weeks before the Udacity Data science class began. I was surrounded by people of various ages, different professions, different motivations, and the two things we all had in common was that we were all female and we all wanted to learn how to code.
For the Udacity course, we arranged a couple of meetups for the students in Stockholm…and the students who showed up…were all women. I wasn’t sure what to make of this. I don’t know if there were an equal number of male and female students in Stockholm admitted to the program to begin with, or if the male students were of a more retiring nature, but either ways, it colored my perception of, and experience in the course. Similar to my coding class, we were all of different ages and in different professions and all united by our desire to learn data science.
Both the all-women, all-tech, all-empowering experiences I’ve had have been altogether awesome. There is a very tangible and oft-acknowledged feeling in both these groups that we need to help each other because we are all women who want to make a change — in our lives, in our careers and in doing so, bring greater parity to the tech workforce.
And I must acknowledge, once again, that if it had not been for the community participation requirement, I doubt I would have helped organize or attend that first Udacity students’ meetup in Stockholm. But because I did, I met a great group of women, with whom I had more in common than I could have anticipated and now we have a Facebook chat group in which we discuss the course, career opportunities, and yes, more mundane topics like children getting sick, stresses at work etc. etc.
To conclude, the Udacity Bertelsmann Data Science Challenge Scholarship Course exceeded my expectations in terms of content, but beyond that, the course has been so much fun, and I’ve connected with some awesome people both from around the world as well as locally, which was completely unexpected.
I hope I get through to the second round of this course and am able to continue on my data science journey with Udacity and Bertelsmann!
