This is me + week 1–3

Hi everyone!

Born in South Korea, raised in Sweden, living in New York. I’m Youn Hee and this is my story.

Let’s start from the beginning. I have a BS in Political science and Economics and I majored in Finance and Macroeconomics. Since I graduated I have worked at 3 different companies in Stockholm, Sweden. I worked with questions related to the European Union, as an industry analyst, wage statistics manager and as an analyst (Feel free to look at my LinkedIn for more details).

In the beginning of 2018 I relocated with my husband to New York. Giving me the opportunity to learn how to master the more technical parts of my field. I applied to the Data Science Immersive program at General Assembly right before we left Sweden and after a couple of intense days of work, I got accepted. Yay! #WINNING

My goal is to complete the 12 weeks and come out on the other side with new skills and as a better Data Analyst. And of course, I hope that I will find a job where I can explore and analyze data and bring valuable insights to my future employer. Right now the days fly by but at the same time, the end of this program seems to be really far away. This is both good and bad I guess. Will I manage to learn in everything in time? Will I survive this furious tempo and the fact that I haven’t done anything else than to look into my computer since I came here? Due to the heavy workload, this blog post is very much delayed. Now 3 of 12 weeks have passed already. So let me take you on a brief journey through my first weeks in class.

Or let’s start with the orientation day. We had an orientation day the week before the program started. It was really good. You met the other students, the instructors, the outcome team and other important people. You also know what the GA space looked like and small things like where the restrooms were located (on thing less to worry about on your first day).

Week 1 We covered the basics in Python, Pandas, and SQL in the lessons. In the labs (yes we have labs, 1–2 per day) everything felt much more advanced. But since I know SQL a bit from before I realized that the labs probably were really basic as well. One thing that is worth mentioning is that if you have time to try to learn a little bit of Python on your own before the class starts that will help you a lot. Now we hit the ground running regarding Python. In the end of the first week, you feel really overwhelmed but you kind of feel that you can handle it. And then boom! They tell you that you also have a project that is going to run over the entire week, plus outcomes things (really important!) and that there will be a quiz every week.

Week 2 Numpy, distributions, inference, data collection, object-oriented programming. I felt ok with the content but to constantly think about the project made the stress level go up. Anyhow, I survived week 2 as well. I did the labs, I presented my project, I did the quiz and I was satisfied with the result.

Week 3 Linear regression, Feature engineering, regression metrics, bias-variance, train/test split and cross-validation, AWS and regularization. Let’s say that they turned everything up a notch this week. The biggest problem is that you never have time to recap what we have done so far. So all the notes are on the computer in Jupiter notebooks, in other text files and on paper and it’s a mess. So try to stay organized from the beginning.

Best takeaways from applying, preparing for class to start and to get through the first weeks:

Applying

• Apply a long time in advance. I did not so I had less than 40 hours to do the case that you have to complete and present connected to your application.

Preparing

• Depending on your pre-knowledge you had to do more or less of an onboarding task. I don’t have either a programming or a math background. So I did kind of bad on the test so I had to do all the parts in the onboarding task. The big take away here is that if you learn what’s in the onboarding task you will be really glad later on since a lot of the stuff covered in the task will be revisited in class.

Week 1–3

• There is a lot to do during this program. I wake up, go to GA, go home from GA, have dinner, work on labs and projects and then I go to bed. Usually, you have stuff that you need to compete over the weekend as well. I do not want to scare you but this is a fact. If you do not have time to put everything else on hold for 12 weeks, then maybe this program is not for you. Another thing that I really want to mention is that you can do this program even though you do not know this stuff from before. That is the whole point. What might happened is that you will really envy the people that already know coding or are really good at math. But hey it’s really something positive, they will be your new best friends ;)

I will try to keep you posted throughout the program. There will be a little bit of text and then the projects. Hopefully, if there is time, I will present some labs that I found interesting. And after the program, I hope I will continue to update the blog, but then maybe with a fewer posts with only text. So stay tuned for the next update!

/yhpf

Originally published at yhpf.github.io.