Over the past few months, I’ve had the privilege to work as a part time instructor for Learn Data Science » Data Science Dojo. When I first started this blog in late 2018, I wrote posts about my data science learning journey that went through MOOCs (Learning Data Science through MOOCs – Lake Data Insights), Kaggle (Learning Data Science through Kaggle – Lake Data Insights), and, ultimately, graduate school (Learning Data Science through Graduate School – Lake Data Insights). Now I have exposure to a fourth option, boot camps, albeit from an instructor perspective rather than a student perspective. That will be the focus of this post.
First, let’s think about what a technology boot camp is all about. A quick Bing search for ‘boot camp definition’ yields the following alternate definition that aligns well with technology boot camps:
“short, intensive, and rigorous course of training”
I don’t have a full history of DoJo, but my understanding is that their training programs originated as an immersive, in person boot camp executed over a short time window. This aligns quite well to the boot camp definition above. As the pandemic impacted travel and in person events, their focus has been to replicate the best parts of the in person boot camp with an online experience. Their most complete training offering today, the Data Science Bootcamp, is now done over 16 weeks with a 5-6 hour commitment per week. This could translate to an intense 2 week offering of in person training.
Reading back through my blog posts describing my data science learning experience, I realize that DoJo’s training aligns well with my graduate school experience, albeit at a significantly condensed and accelerated pace. Here are a few similarities with my grad school experience:
- Structure – One of the reasons that I transitioned from MOOCs to graduate school was to get more structure in my learning plan. Like academic programs, the DoJo team uses its experience in industry and training to decide what needs to be taught and in what order.
- Instructor led – Getting tailored in person instruction, access to instructors via office hours, email, and discussion groups, and feedback on assignments are all things that DoJo offers. One difference from my grad school experience is that DoJo lectures are in real time instead of on demand. There are trade-offs with this approach.
- On line learning platform – Having an online learning platform containing all resources for the class is something I didn’t realize I was missing with MOOCs until I had it in graduate school. DoJo’s online learning platform is similar to my graduate school experience in both experience and utility.
- Cohorts – Another thing I didn’t realize would be valuable was having a cohort of classmates going through a class with me. There’s something to be said about having the support, perspectives, and peer pressure of a cohort. This was an important part of my graduate school experience as my peers were a great source of learning.
- Project focused – My graduate courses often required hands on projects, frequently personally developed. DoJo has a similar expectation.
- Academic credit – While not a Master of Science, the DoJo program provides a certificate from the University of New Mexico upon completion of their course, assignments, and related project.
There are obvious tradeoffs in the time investment and depth of topics. I invested significantly more time in my 12 semester long graduate school courses than what I would have done in a boot camp. This enabled me to dive into much more depth on a variety of topics. But it also took me three years to cover that ground and it’s difficult to assess if alternative paths would have yielded a similar Data science grad school top 10 – Lake Data Insights more efficiently.
As with any other investment decision, the analysis comes back to your return on investment (ROI). In my brief experience with DoJo’s training programs, the ROI is quite high. The most important topics are brought to you by experienced instructors with the support of a cohorts and a solid online learning platform. Combining this training with hands on projects can quickly improve your analytics capabilities – whether that is as a data informed expert or a data scientist/engineer/architect.
Picture details: Late summer flowers, 9/6/2020, Canon PowerShot G3 X, f/5.6, 1/200 s, ISO-1600