My Path to Becoming a Data Scientist
In this Blogpost, I am going to share some resources that I have used to buildup some of my data science skills. I hope that it is helpful for someone who is getting started in the field.
I started by doing two courses on udemy:
- 2020 Complete Python Bootcamp: From Zero to Hero in Python
- Python for Data Science and Machine Learning Bootcamp
Both of these courses were taught by Jose Portilla and I really liked the content and the way he structured them. Both courses are project focused; he teaches the concept and then shows how to apply them on projects.
I then decided to attend the Bootcamp in Data Science at Flatiron school. It was a 15-week program in which you cover Python, SQL, how to explore the data, and how/when to apply different algorithms to build predictive models. One of the aspects that I found most valuable in the program was that it was a project focused. You learn a skill and you have a short timeframe to build a project and give a non-technical presentation. It was a great and valuable experience because I learned to be comfortable with not knowing and quickly building up the skills to apply to projects.
After the Bootcamp I continue to improve my skills. There are a lot of free online resources that you can take advantage of. Udacity has two courses, if you are interested in Deep Learning:
The projects also have notebooks that you can follow along and you can use to start building your portfolio.
As a data scientist, you also need to continue to improve your coding skills. For this purpose, I have mainly been using HackerRank and LeetCode.