In February, I have enrolled Flatiron Immersive Data Science program. I preferred to enroll full-time in-person program instead of self-paced or online because I thought that to be on the campus makes me more motivated. In this post, I will write about my experiences with Bootcamp.
First of all, I did not have big expectations when I was starting the program. Of course, I knew the syllabus and details about it, but I did not know how much we practice and work on hands-on projects. In the boot camp, I finished 5 modules. Each module has different goals and I had to finish the assignment and project of each module for graduation. Project weeks were really tough to survive, even I felt like my final weeks in university. Certainly, the most difficult one was the capstone project which we have worked for the last 3 weeks.
Now, when I look at my first project, I can obviously see how much I have improved my knowledge and skills. Here, I would like to say 'Thank you' to our lead instructor Bryan Arnold and our coach Lindsey Berlin. They always supported me to push my boundaries. In the first project, I got my data by using the API key and web-scrabbing. It took two days to understand how to get my data. If they wrote the code for me and gave me ready code, I would not learn how to do it myself. Instead of giving the code to me, they gave me the perspective on how to solve this problem. This is the approach that I was used to from university, so it helps me a lot.
Because of Covid-19, we continued to our last 3 modules remotely. It is easier to focus on campus rather than home exactly. But, I experienced different skills in this remote system such as;
- How to working in a team remotely
- Being self-sufficient
- Focusing on online lectures
- How to get online help from instructors
Flatiron's full-time remote schedule helped me a lot to keep my motivation. When I began to feel more relaxed, it kept me engaged with its strict schedule and syllabus. Even, we had accountability channel with our instructors which reminded our goals every day.
For the capstone project, I worked on sentiment analysis with deep learning and build book recommendation systems from Kindle Store reviews on Amazon, even it was impossible to imagine for me when I was in the first module. I feel pretty comfortable about what I learned in Flatiron and it was worth the risk to leave my job. If you have any questions about Bootcamp, please feel free to ask about my experience. To see details of my projects, my GitHub repo can be found here.
Cover photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash and gif is from giphy
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