01 Chapter: Course Outline
This course is designed to prepare you for getting your first job as a data scientist by guiding you through hands-on learning projects to replicate the work of data scientists. These projects are an invaluable addition to your portfolio and allow you to demonstrate competency in handling a project end-to-end. The curated videos, articles, and interactive classes teach you the fundamentals of data science, which you’ll practice through mini-projects and apply to your capstone projects. In addition, we’ll prepare you for the career you want through proven strategies.
The course aims to: Equip you with technical skills to launch a successful career in data science. Empower you to secure a data science job through a proven job search strategy.
As you work through the course, you’ll see that the units cover the basic concepts of data science. These will allow you to explore several learning tracks in the latter part, including the generalist, natural language processing, and deep learning.
Some students start the course knowing what they want to study, while others would like to know more before choosing a specialization. Take your time and work through the curriculum units and your first capstone project before choosing your learning track. Discuss your interests with your mentor to receive feedback and guidance. You can also design your first capstone project to broadly cover an area of interest in order to understand if it’s the right decision for you. Over the course of the next few months, your mentor will get to know your strengths and interests and can help you choose a specialization. After selecting your specialization in Unit 12, resources specific to that track will be available to you.
Your Data Science Portfolio Your portfolio is a compilation of all the projects that you’ll complete as a part of the course. The portfolio demonstrates your experience in data science and is a key asset that you’ll leverage during your capstone project and when searching for jobs after the course.
A complete list of projects for your portfolio can be found here.
If you’d like to get an idea of what a completed portfolio looks like, here are a few examples from Springboard students:
Aashish Jain: Predicting the Likelihood of Flight Cancellations (Report, Presentation, GitHub)
- https://github.com/aajains/springboard-datascience-intensive/blob/master/capstone_project/Report/CapstoneReport.pdf
- https://github.com/aajains/springboard-datascience-intensive/blob/master/capstone_project/Slides/CapstoneProjectSlides.pdf
- https://github.com/aajains/springboard-datascience-intensive
Pablo Guevara: Research Market Analysis (Github)
Pablo Guevara: Loan Default Predictive Modeling (Github)
