NYC Data Science Academy

I took the class with Jon Krohn and could not be more pleased. Jon has a rare ability to take a complicated subject and reduce it to its fundamental elements. Instead of approaching the problems with math alone, Jon spends time crafting examples and analogies to make sure students understand the actual building blocks conceptually. That produces an epiphanic experience where we were able to visualize what is happening behind the scenes. The concepts I’ve learned in this class is something I plan to apply to real-world problems and therefore highly recommend this class to anyone who wants to learn about this field. 

I am Brazilian and I was working in the business area for 7 years in Brazil, analyzing health and safety indicators, incidents, and some other data to try to get insights and drive some business decisions. I didn’t have any coding background and I was lacking advanced statistics knowledge to help me out on finding insights. So, after reading a lot about data science I started a MBA in Big Data and Analytics here in Brazil but this MBA was not exactly what I was looking for. I needed something more practical with more coding challenges and more details (theory and coding) on machine learning models, etc. With that in mind, I started looking for other courses to fulfill my needs. I ended up finding the data science bootcamp at NYC Data Science Academy, quitting my job, stopping my MBA and went to New York to attend the bootcamp. This was the best decision I have ever made.

  Learning how to code in both R and Python is very useful and the way that the bootcamp teaches you theory and the application of machine learning is great. It’s not easy, the pace is very fast, so you really need to focus and study a lot and you will see how much you can learn in only 12 weeks. You will be very busy learning theory and completing exercises everyday, besides projects, coding challenges, labs, machine learning challenges, etc.   The projects are very challenging and very useful to learn and practice what you have learnt by the time of the project. If you do a good job, you will have a good portfolio to present to future employers.   The instructors and the TA’s have different backgrounds, so you can reach them with any subject you are learning. They are very helpful and easy to reach out. The entire team is very hardworking and they push you hard to go deeper and learn more and more.    The environment is great, the students help each other, share what they learnt from other materials and from completing the exercises as well. The facilities are very good, I spent late nights there studying together with other students.   This bootcamp allowed me to change quickly my career. I came back to Brazil after the bootcamp and 2 months later I got the job offer I wanted in a great consulting company. I think if you really want to become a data scientist, this is the place to start. The team is very good in preparing the students for all the steps on interviews, writing a good resume, etc.

I attended the Deep Learning course at the NY Data Science Academy that was taught by Jon Krohn during October 2017 - December 2017. Overall it was exactly what I hoped it would be. It gave me a strong foundation of all the core deep learning concepts. The class was hosted on every other saturday which allowed enough time to fully explore a particular topic between classes. Jon made a particular effort to keep the material simple and explained the concepts intuitely rather than with complicated math. Jon has great understanding of the content and is well prepared for each lesson. I thoroughly enjoyed the class and it has motivated me to pivot my career into deep learning. I would recommend this class to anyone who is passionate about deep learning but don't know where to begin. It is also great for anyone who has worked with some but not all of the deep learning techniques.

TL;DR: The NYCDSA full-time bootcamp is a great way to start a career pivot into data science. The curriculum covers the most important topics in the space; the instructors are accessible and actually care; and you'll get out what you put in.

The first four weeks are python and R basics. These can get a little tedious and heavy on programming, but are important so that you can fly around when doing the more advanced stuff. The next couple are on web scraping, then a few more on machine learning, then some on more advanced topics like distributed computing, time series analysis, and deep learning. 

The 3-hour morning lectures are helpful and touch on the most important issues from a high level. The homework assignments (usually every other day) and projects (4 total) are how you actually retain the information. If you stay on top of these assignments and aren't afraid to ask for help, you'll learn so so much! I thought the first ~8 weeks were thorough and well-paced. I thought the last 4 weeks rushed through a number of advanced topics without enough time to retin the information through projects, homeworks, and other "real world" practice. I'd recommend choosing a few of these topics to really focus on in your projects rather than trying to understand everything from the last 4 weeks just from a high level.

This particular bootcamp has a lot of industry connections. After graduating, the hiring partner cocktail event will lead to a number of interviews with companies looking for entry level people.

Taking this bootcamp (or any other, frankly) provides a stamp of legitimacy on your pivot to data science that you probably couldn't get from just teaching yourself python and doing online coursera courses.

You'll get out what you put in with NYCDSA. Sometimes this means 60 hour weeks right before projects are due.

It's important when learning anything to get the fundamentals right. If you build bad habits, it can become difficult to fix them later on, especially if you have also built many dependencies on those bad habits. This is why when I wanted to start learning about data science, I chose to take this course to help me make the right choices from the very beginning.

I would say that I got exactly what I came for. Tony is a very good instructor. He is able to express complicated concepts in an understandable way, and I would definitely say that now I understand enough about the Python ecosystem that I could start learning on my own if I wanted. 

I spent my undergraduate years focusing on the life sciences without much formal educational background in programming and advanced statistics. While working as a data analyst my first few years out of college, I gained practical coding experience in R, picking up general programming and modeling experience - even still, I lacked the underlying foundation needed to understand and implement more complex machine learning for my projects at work.

The NYCDSA online bootcamp was the perfect blend of machine learning theory and practical, hands-on projects helping to solidify the lecture concepts. The overall experience was intense: I worked full-time at my day job and spent most of my free time (~30 hours/week) keeping up with lectures, course projects and career development - but got out an incredible learning experience, which helped me to perform more advanced projects at my current job and ultimately to find a new full-time data science role. My TA, meeting with me at least weekly, along with my online cohort of 4 other students, held us all accountable for staying on track with course deadlines and project work. This accountability was a crucial component in keeping us motivated throughout the 5 months; other online programs fail to do this and suffer student dropout as a result.

Another invaluable outcome of the program is the portfolio of projects (~5), which NYCDSA greatly emphasizes and helps groom. I used these as a demonstration of my experience (both from a coding standpoint on GitHub, and data storytelling standpoint, on the NYCDSA blog) in almost all job applications. While one does not need to attend a bootcamp in order to create a project portfolio, NYCDSA makes sure to curate and grade the assignments so as to demonstrate in the portfolio an important mix of technical skillsets sought in the job market, and holds its students to higher standards of work quality than they might hold themselves.

I came to NYCDSA immediately after graduating from college with a bachelors in math and finance. I had been struggling with passing quantitative interviews due to my lack of programming skills. The New York City Data Science Academy helped out sooo much on that end by constantly keeping us busy with lectures, homework, and projects. I was very surprised at how quickly I was able to learn programming in Python and pass assessments and interviews for a number of top hedge funds. There is no way I would've been able to learn as much as I did in as short amount of a time anywhere else. On top of that, having instructors, TAs, and a team devoted to helping me develop the skils and connections I needed was invaluable. After graduating from the bootcamp, I completed a project in Python for a quantitative investment firm, impressed them, and got the job. I'm so glad I came to NYCDSA to build the skills I needed for a career I'm truly passionate about. 

I came into NYC Data Science with experience working as a data analyst at several companies and active data consulting work.

At NYDSA, I wanted to spend three months solidifying my existing skillset as data analyst and learning areas that I did not know much about like machine learning and big data.  In my jobs, I had previously worked with both Python and R, and appreciated the value of both languages. I also liked that NYDSA wasn't part of some big cookie cutter data science bootcamp chain. 

For the first month of NYCDSA when we covered topics like data wrangling, visualization, shiny, and web scraping,  it was mostly review for me. That being said, I learned some new tools and tricks, and was able to work on some interesting projects with some help with from our great teachers. I also got to meet and learn from a lot of interesting classmates. The students at NYDSA come from a wide variety of backgrounds, from PHDs to straight out of bachelors programs, and are definitiely part of the value of the program. 

After watching me instruct classmates on web scraping, which I had a lot of experience with before the bootcamp, NYCDSA asked me if I wanted to record web scraping lectures for their online data science bootcamp. I agreed to record them and got to have some experience teaching while I was still a student in the bootcamp, which both solidied my skills and helped me earn back some of tuition. 

During the machine learning and big data portion of the bootcamp, I was exposed to lots of new material and learned a lot. While I still have a lot to learn, I now have a good understanding of different machine learning models and techniques, and some of the big data technologies. 

One month after the bootcamp ended, I started working full-time at a consulting company that I was consulting for during the bootcamp. With my experience in the program, I was able to negotiate better terms on my contract with the company. In addition, I have been doing some additional data science consulting on the side (one project referred by NYCDSA) and the skills learned at NYDSA have benefited me in all my work. 

If you invest your time in the program, you will get three months of data science learning with awesome teachers who know their stuff and are willing to help you through any learning hurdles. As someone who has and continues to learn most of this stuff on my own, three months with expert teachers definitely accelerated my learning pace. So if you want to spend three months learning a lot of data science, I would recommend you sign up 

I have had a very positive experience during and after completion of the NYC Data Science Academy's Full-Time Data Science BootCamp. I chose this particular school because they were the most transparent (the full - and very rigirous ciriculum is available on their website) and the depth and breadth of interview questions from the Data Science Academy convinced me that they take this very seriously - and that this would be a very difficult but rewarding 12 weeks.

To start from the beginning. the application process of the time was rather straightforward - a web application, a short programming assignment, and an interview. Although I didn't have much familiarity with Python or R and had been working in the retail wealth management industry for the past 3 years, my educational background is a B.S. in Mathematics and a minor in Computer Science and was considered sufficicient for me to be accepted into the program. In hindsight, I think the most important prerequisite (outside of the base math/computer knowledge) is having passion for data/programming/AI/statistics/etc then the potential difficultiy of the content becomes secondary to your desire to learn and improve.

The Data Science Academy did a terrific job selecting the studens - the main commonality being the passion and desire to learn a lot of difficult content in a short amount of time.

The program is project oriented - both individual and group projects. There is a good deal of flexibility about the project topic/content so each student ends up with a unique portfolio of ~4 projects (and corresponding presentations/blog posts).

For example, I did an EDA (Exploratory Data Analysis) project and created an interactive webapp using R and Shiny based on data for a particular anti-poverty initiative from a large mulitinational charity. This webapp visualized the breakdown in demographics, geography, and other metrics to help that organization identify trends in the data and better allocate their resources going forward.

The other projects I worked on utilized a wide array of popular datascience tools and techniques, my personal favorites: web scraping (big fan of Selenium + BeautifulSoup ), natural language processing, visualizations, and machine learning.  There are a few technical resources available that not all students take adavantage of, those are the various linux servers and hadoop/spark clusters available. During the machine learning project, each time I ran my ensemble of models it woud incapacitate my laptop for ~30hours. I soon discovered the value of using a high powered remote server for number crunching - and polished my linux/BASH scripting skills in the process.

The staff and instructuors are very thoughtful about keeping an environment condusive to learning. Every Friday there would be a Q&A session with the staff where they would ask the students their thoughts on the pace of this week's ciriculum along with other questions/issues. I mentioned that the hand sanitizer dispensar was empty, they listened and had it filled the next week.

The instructors are great. The lecture sessions can run on a bit long, but they are finely tuned machines, packed with a ton of great content and example code. They are accessible on slack and answer frequently answered my coding questions at odd hours of the evening. As the content grew in difficulty, it was very obvious that each instructor has mastered the topic of their lecture - I never felt dissapointed with their answers to my questions.

The atmosphere was condusive to learning, everyone was open to helping each with homework/project coding questions if asked. I was pleased with the sense of comradary among the students as opposed to the toxic competitive environments I've seen at some traditional higher education institutions.

The Raspberry Pi computers have been a personal interes of mine, and one of my projects usilng a Pi 3 caught the attention of the managent staff at the Academy. He saw some good potential, and put me in touch with their PR contact, two months later my project gets publised online and in print  - https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/issues/61/ (page 13).

Towrds the end of the BootCamp their staff put me directly in contact with several managers/exeutives at business hiring data science personell. I had much better job application results when I leveraged their network as opposed to a cold application. Althought it took a few months after graduating, the Data Science Academy put me in contact with my future employer.

Currently I'm working with the title Data Science Contractor for a Data Science Consultancy. I am extremely happy with the work I'm doing. Every day I get to work on interesting conceptual puzzles and work with Amazon and Google's cloud computing and big data tools. Our work is primarily done in Python, BASH, and SQL, and the NYC Data Science Academy really helped me prepare for the various technical and statistiacal challenges in this profession.

I couldn't be happier with my decision.

I attended the Spring 2017 Cohort of the data science bootcamp at the NYC Data Science Academy. Originally I had read up about the program in 2015 but did not feel prepared to quit my job and take a leap into a full-time bootcamp. I spent about 2 years preparing myself by taking courses online (mostly through coursera) to build up my Python and R skills. Part of me was hoping that coursera courses would be enough to land a job as a Data Scientist or even as a Data Analyst, however that was not the case. Finally in January of 2017 I felt a bit more confident to apply to the bootcamp, and once accepted I decided to officially make the switch into a career in data science. 

The bootcamp curriculum is very intensive and cannot be taken lightly. A majority of my fellow students were in a similar situation where they quit their jobs, and invested a great deal of time and money considering that this program is not cheap. Keeping that in mind it's very important to understand that this is not a golden ticket to a better paying job. Simply showing up every day will not be enough to get the most out of your investment while attending this program. 

Before the Bootcamp:

The pre-work which is part-time and can be completed online or in person is very important as it serves as a preview of the first couple of weeks of the program. If you complete all of the pre-work (which I highly suggest) the first few weeks of the bootcamp might seem to be full of redundant information and make you question your decision to pay for a very expensive course which is teaching you things you already know. Don't worry too much about that because that is just the calm before the storm as things pick up very quickly as you approach the end of the first month. It's also much better to spend the first few weeks mastering the basics by going over things you know as compared to jumping into the deep end by learning everything for the first time on Day 1 of the bootcamp. Take advantage of this "down time" to master the basics and prepare yourself for what's to come because once you get to machine learning things start to get very serious. 

The pre-work mostly covers Python and R programming which are vital skills to have in order to make it through the program. If you can have a basic understand of Python and R before the bootcamp it will only help you because just like anything else the more you do it the better you get at it. The pre-work doesn't include SQL which I believe is very important to have at least a general understanding of the basics. It also doesn't unclude linear algebra or statistics which are also extremely important especially if you have been out of school for a while. You do not have to master any of these (Python, R, SQL, linear algebra, or basic statistics) before the bootcamp but having a basic understanding will help a great deal. 

During the Bootcamp:

During the 12 weeks every day involves learning new information, and that is why it is extremely important to keep up with the homework to review what you have learned. The projects are also very helpful to link everything together. The projects are a great opportunity to showcase your data science skills and you should pick topics which are relevant to industries you are interested in. Make sure you can explain every aspect of your project because you will be asked questions about them during interviews. 

The staff is extremely helpful and will take the time needed to help you with anything you need to keep you moving forward so do not hesitate to pull an instructor or TA aside to ask questions. The program is not perfect and the staff is constantly working to improve the curriculum. Pulse check on Friday afternoons is a great opportunity to voice your concerns (which my cohort took full advantage of) and speak your mind of what you find helpful and what can be improved. This is not only helpful to you and your cohort, but also for future cohorts.   

After the Bootcamp:

Once you make it through the 12 weeks the learning does not stop, because you will feel that there is much you still do not feel confident about. This is an unfortunately do to the fact that during the limited amount of time (12 weeks) there is a great deal of breadth of materials covered but it's impossible to go into great depth on each topic. This is when your show of commitment comes into play where you have to review concepts which you do not feel confident about. Reviewing the material is helpful, and completing coding challenges through HackerRank also helps. The recommended textbook is another great resource (ISLR) which should ideally be read before or during the bootamp. I unfortunately waited until after to read the text which is great for reviewing the machine learning concepts. There are many resources available to help review. I found some very helpful YouTube videos other other textbooks to review machine learning concepts I did not feel confident about. This will obviously vary from person to person depending on your learning style. You can choose to spend time reviewing everything, or focus on mastering concepts which are relevant to jobs your are applying to. 

Job Hunt:

The NYC Data Science Academy is there for you during your job hunt. They will help you fix your resume which helped me go from getting no replies for jobs that I would apply to before the bootcamp, to having 10 phone interviews lined up within 2-3 weeks of finishing the program. The hiring partner event is a great opportunity to connect with prospective employers. Mock interviews are available to help work on interviewing skills. I had my mock interview 2 days before my actual interview, and it was a previous graduate who is currently working as a data scientist. His advice helped to boost my confidence and within a few days of my actual interview I received an offer. 

Take Home Message:

Overall it was a great experience for me and I do not regret the sacrifices I made to attend the program. If you are interested in this program please give it your best and keep in mind that at the end of the day the burden is on you. You are the one who has the most to lose if you do not take full advantage of this opportunity. There is a great deal of self-studying involved before, during, and after the program. The more dedication and effort you put into your journey to become a data scientist, the more likely it will result in a positive outcome. You might hear back from some of the jobs that you apply to, you might not hear back from most of them. Not all interviews will go well but with each failure you will learn what needs to be improved. My advice is that if you are motivated and dedicated to start a career in data science, and willing to put in the required work then this 12 week data science bootcamp at the NYC Data Science Academy is the right choice for you. 

It is one of my best decisions to attend NYC Data Science Academy. During the bootcamp, I gained more confidence in programming. The coding skills taught are always on trend. Followed by the schedule of the bootcamp, I smoothly transferred my career path into data science. I do not only learned R, Python with corresponding practical, popular libraries in industrial applications but also acquired the ability in quickly learning new skills. NYC Data Science Academy provides students a good platform to communicate computer programming, machine learning algorithms, and its applications. Instructors and TAs are always helpful and patient for students to overcome difficulties in the study and provide supports. At the same time, students could have a blog platform with editing help to present projects. Interview skill development and career advice from Chris and Vivian are powerful to develop students as strong competitors in the job market. I really appreciate the knowledge, skills, and support I acquired from NYC Data Science Academy. I highly recommend NYC Data Science Academy to anyone who is interested in this career.