Posts
Comments
Yet another student reporting in with a highly positive experience!
I personally felt Jonah knew data science really well. In addition to solid theoretical understanding of the mathematics, he was extremely proficient with using R and statistics to dissect and analyze complex real world data sets. At the beginning, he provided virtually step by step guidance on analysis and interpretation of several data sets using a variety of techniques and packages in R. The program only became more self-directed over time because the students, with diverse backgrounds and experiences, focused on different areas and progressed at different rates. Even then, I felt Jonah was very actively providing individually tailored guidance for the students on their learning and projects.
If you have strong fundamentals and are capable of getting up to speed on R quickly, then you can get a lot out of this program as I did. It provided me the basic knowledge and practice on using programming/statistics/machine learning to find patterns in real world data and make useful, meaningful statistical predictions from them. After this program, I know more or less how to approach data science, work independently, and fill whatever gaps I have. I would highly recommend this program to a self-motivated, mathematically minded person looking for a job in data science.
A lot of us came in with very different levels of knowledge and a big factor that determined success was whether or not you had experience with programming beforehand. To be fair a lot of non-programmers ended up being stars, like the student who made the word cloud, but they had to work a lot harder.