I recently enrolled in Metis, a 12-week data science bootcamp in San Francisco, to help me change careers from basic research/academia. For those that are unfamiliar with this education model, a bootcamp essentially is an short, intense program to help you obtain the skills and career resources to start a new career, typically in the tech sector. And intense sure is the right word for it! Although I feel like I was probably more prepared than most since I did a PhD in a quantitative, physical science coding in Python on real projects, the speed that the material moves was certainly fast. Even near the beginning when we were covering Python packages I had more or less experience working in, hearing someone explain various features of the packages was extremely helpful to fill in the gaps since I was self-taught. (I once used a nested for loop to do matrix multiplication instead of, you know, np.dot().) Once the first couple days had passed, though, we were quickly in new territory.

Despite the fast pace of the material, the work so far has been really enjoyable and challenging. The instructors (Andrew and Brian in this case) are also really helpful if you have any questions or want clarification. I also enjoy that most of the work is project-based, which really helps with the problem design and creative sides of the work and more closely mimics the real work you might do. After working on an initial project looking at MTA turnstile data in a group, I'm currently working on a web scraping/regression project gathering data from a beer review website (more on that later). I had never used packages like BeautifulSoup, which allows parsing of HTML documents. After a couple days of playing around, though, I was able to surreptitiously download 35,000 beer reviews over the weekend to test regression machine learning algorithms on. I felt like such a hacker!

Of course, I would be mistaken to not mention the people in the bootcamp, who so far have all been really awesome. This includes not only the instructors and other staff but also the other members of my cohort. Everyone has such varied and interesting backgrounds (although it seems PhDs and engineers are overrepresented) and the drive to succeed and learn. People also seem to have quite a bit of personality; I even found a running buddy for the lunch break! We went out for an unofficial happy hour last Friday to celebrate the completion of the first project earlier in the week, and I had a great time talking to everyone. Several people from the previous cohort also attended, and talking to them about their experiences was also interesting. Besides, doing something besides stare at a computer screen was really relieving! (It was especially a relief to have a couple beers after spending two days writing code where "beer" was included in all the variable names.) The next project presentation is this Friday, so I hope we get the chance to do that again.

In any case, it has been exciting and challenging so far, and I can't wait to learn more about SQL, natural language processing, and other topics in the coming weeks!