So I finished the MIT College of Computing course, “DATA SCIENCE AND MACHINE LEARNING: MAKING DATA-DRIVEN DECISIONS” (remotely) where we studied recommendation systems, deep learning, classification and hypothesis testing, regression and prediction, making sense of unstructured data, and statistics, all using Python.
We did a few somewhat interesting projects but didn’t really deep dive into it too much since it was only a few month-long program. I hope to be able to do more in-depth work performing these types of analyses in future!
The best part of the program for me was actually being humbled by being among so many smart, studious, hardworking people and backgrounds including c-suite to students. They had a private leaderboard setup. My overall grade was 553/600 which is a low A and I probably could have actually studied for the tests and done better but an A wasn’t enough to get me high on the leaderboard. Historically, I’m used to being among the “smart kids” in class, but in this class, so many of us were awesomely smart and excellent that my overall class rank was only 35/85. I actually like that. Too often I feel like I have a lot I can give to help others, but I am not among a lot of people I could learn from. My only regret was that we only really interacted during our live classes so mostly with the professor, not so much with each other, because I really enjoyed being among so many smart minds!