After about a month of waiting after the course ended, I finally got my statement of accomplishment for the Coursera course Introduction to Data Science.
At first, I wasn’t going to take this course. I figured that the Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng would preoccupy my time and summer enough and it would probably be best to stick to one class at a time. However, once I saw the opportunity the class provided: which included assignments gathering Twitter data through Python, utilizing Apache Pig to analyze data, and connecting to a Amazon S3 database, I figured that I should just go the distance and take the class regardless.
The assignments for the class were very diverse and did decently in getting people’s feet wet with different analytic tools such as SQL queries, Tableau dashboards, and Kaggle competitions. Although to be honest, I think that the lecture videos could be better. The articles went over a wide variety of topics, but there was not as much guidance on applying the information learned in the lectures to the assignments given as I would have hoped.
All in all, I think that the course was alright. The assignments were worthwhile, although I felt that I had a huge advantage having some type of programming background using data. Like the machine learning course, I believe one has to be extremely motivated to learn the material on their own. It’s easy to just skip, procrastinate, and drop out of the course without punishment. However, even though I spent a good amount of time in this class, it isn’t going to exactly show up on my college transcript, and it isn’t exactly a verified certificate, I learned a great deal of information and it was pretty worthwhile.
Here’s the link to the course if you are interested: https://www.coursera.org/course/datasci
