This week I start teaching students the skills and technologies that will transform them into data scientists – invaluable team members at startups and large companies that are radically changing how the world thinks about data.
In San Francisco, General Assembly (GA) is starting their 5th data science immersive course on January 30th, 2017. I will be one of its two Data Science instructors that will bring our expertise and industry expereince into the classroom and the curriculum.
My industry experience includes building scalable data products for Wine.com and NASA. For Wine.com, I built a recommendation system using Spark’s machine learning library. This system provides each user with personalized recommendations based on their wine preferences. At NASA’s center in Mountain view, I built a scalable feature extraction ETL pipeline for geospatial images. This project runs on their in-house supercomputer called Pleiades.
These projects and others can be found on my GitHub welcome **** page.
Our students are working professionals that are hungry for change and new challenges and have a deep desire to leverage the data science tool kit to improve businesses and people’s lives. Their academic backgrounds range from mathematics and engineering to business. They each bring unique strengths, work experience, and perspectives that will cross-pollinate ideas and lead to a rich learning environment.
Some of my students’ personal interests include salsa and swing dancing as well as cross fit and kick boxing. I’m someone whose lifestyle also includes various forms of physical exercises such as dancing tango and olympic weight lifting. I’ve barely gotten to know my students, but we’re already bonding and building relationships that will make the next 3 months a fun and memorable experience for everyone.
GA invests not only in the outcomes of students, but instructors as well. I’ve been impressed with the level of support that instructors receive in terms of training and feedback. GA nurtures the active learning and growth mind set approach to education, an approach that continues to lead to successful outcomes for students and instructors alike.
By incorporating the industry experience of their data scientists, GA ensures that students receive the most up-to-date and industry relevant training possible. For the past two weeks, I’ve been working through GA’s Instructor Training Circuit (ITC) and helping build the course’s data science curriculum.
In that time, I’ve gotten to know GA students – not just from the DSI program, but from other programs as well. There is a palpable sense of excitement, collaboration, and innovative thinking as students work on their projects, creating data-driven products and solutions.
Feel free to reach out to me with questions that you may have regarding GA’s DSI program or my work in data science.
Also, we are looking for guest speakers to come into the classroom and share with students how the data science skills and technologies they’re learning solve real-world problems. If you’re interested, let me know!
