I did it! I graduated!
After nearly a year of online courses, homework, assignments, and after work projects, culminating in a final Capstone project, I completed my Data Science Certification from John Hopkins University. And the experience was awesome.
Johns Hopkins University (Coursera delivered) Data Science Specialization
I highly recommend the Johns Hopkins program for any out there interested in getting their Data Science mojo down. It helps to have a strong background in programming and statistics; either graduate-level courses or a lot of industry experience. But even if you have one but not the other, I still recommend it. One of the great things about Coursera is the option to take a course for no credit at no cost to learn the material, and then go back and take the course for credit.
So that’s it. I’ve finished the program. Next comes … Hadoop Developer Certification, most likely. That should be a pretty tame set of studies compared the to the last year of R, Data Science fundamentals, and applied predictive models. With any luck I’ll have completed that goal too before the end of 2015.
My intent for 2016 is to master the tools that come with Kali Linux, help to start a satellite of Hackers and Founders in Utah, learn Spark and enough Scala to get by, and hopefully explore a Hololens or something like it.
But in the end, Data Science is the foundation upon which all the looming innovation coming our way necessarily depends.
If there’s hope for humanity, it’s in software.
Everybody say ‘Amen.’
