Data Science Career Track

I was enrolled in the data science career track of Springboard. I found the entire Springboard community (Mentors, TAs, Career Coaches, Student Advisor and Communities) very supportive and loved the wholistic data science learning experience. I recommend the springboard data science ceritication for anyone who is serious about enhancing their daat science career.

I just completed the SpringBoard Data Science Career Track program.  

The purpose of the program is to give you the research skills to work in the Data Science world.  It helps you prepare for the job search and the basic skills to be successful in the position.  

PROs
1:1 weekly mentor call.  
Office hours.
Career prep (university courses are theoretical, not real world focusing on the job.)

CONs
Time consuming (another part of your life will be sacrificed for awhile).
Should give more attention on business side.  Data Science is great but needs to keep the company's mission as the most important thing.  

Conclusion:
Do it!

Overall, I had a very nice experience with SpringBoard. The most useful resources to me are my career coach and mentor. 

My career coach is extremely supportive, and helped me throughout my interview process, and always gave me very prompt replies. Big thanks!

My (2nd) mentor is very patient, knowledgable and supportive. Always thinking from my perspective, and sharing all he knows about a problem. 

SpringBoard is also very supportive when I had to switch mentor two months into my program. I think it is worth the effort to find someone that is suitable for your background and situation. Don't settle down with someone you don't feel comfortable.

SpringBoard administation and student advisor team are also very responsive everytime I need help. 

One thing that may require improvement is the course material, which appears to be a big collection of online videos and articles. So after going through, I would not treat it as a structured course like from school, but rather a big libary with most things about data science up to now. The good thing is that I provides me a complete picture of what are the things available and need to know. But some people may feel overwhelmed if they try to completely read everything, and lose focus. My advice is that feel free to skip and bookmark some of them (most of them are free online materials that you can always access), but just be aware that they exist and come back when you really need them. 

I have an environmental engineering background and spent 6 months on the data science career track via springboard hoping to step into the data science career. It's definitely challenging and intense when you have a full time job at the same time. If you do not have the time, energy or persistence, I suggest you get yourself both mentally and physically prepared, if you have a full time job. The course program is good overall, not perfect. But the same goes for all other data science boot camps, as they are a relatively new field and still growing. The mentorship offered by springboard is definitely a highlight of the program and I had a great experience with my mentor. I got a couple of data scientist offers right before I finished the program and the outcome is extremely rewarding. If you are fully prepared, dedicated, and eager to learn and constantly challenging yourself (the learning does not stop through out your career), then I highly recommend this program to you. And best luck!

Springboard helped me ultimately transition from a career in academia to one where I applied my knowledge of research and the scientific method to industry problems in data science. My weekly mentor calls helped me contextualize my online training (which I could do completely on my own, about 10-12 hours each week on my own time) and also helped me understand how best to market my projects to appeal when I applied for jobs. While some can afford to quit their jobs and attend trainings like this full-time, Springboard allowed me to continue to support myself while gaining the training I needed to re-tailor my resume for a data science career.

This intensive course prepared me for my data science role!

SpringBoard is an ideal bootcamp for many reasons. There are flexible payment options, the course is entirely online, and there is tons of support from the large community and network of mentors. The curriculum uses many different resources to keep things fresh, exposes you to many different data science methodologies, and has two capstone project. The capstone projects were my favorite part of the bootcamp, as they were where I was able to learn best, bringing everything I had learned together for a problem that I got to choose. Overall a wonderful learning experience.

This program has many great resources to help you advance your skills as well as a curriculum that keeps you focused and scheduled in completing your work. There is a community of people looking to help you including career coaches, weekly mentor calls, which I used to discuss the projects I was working on as well as specific questions about coding. And an online forum of students asking questions pertaining to the same types of projects you are working on. The main focus of the course is completing two main capstone projects which are geared towards building your portfolio and are exemplary of work one may do in a data science career. While there are many smaller mini projects included in the course that are also good practice to improving python and sql skills, there could be created content designed for learning the code and applications needed in these types of assignments. A significant portion of the curriculum was just courses on DataCamp and video lectures, while informative, are not particularly useful in grasping the concepts needed. For an expensive course, I was expecting more specialized resources focused on learning the skills needed, rather than just projects that force you to know the material and go out and use it, which is difficult at first and slowed my progress throughout the beginning of the course. I viewed this as being both a good and bad thing, because although I began working on these projects without all the necessary knowledge and skills, it forced me to pick them up as I went along.

Pros:
- dedicated mentor
- can schedule calls with random mentors for problems your having with very open times to choose (super helpful)
- access to datacamp and linkedinlearning (my favorite platform to learn data is from datacamp personally)
- Excellent administrative team
- Excellent career support team with advice well in line with reality, always super friendly
- Show you how to network properly
- Annual springboard rise event
- Involved student community

Cons: 
- too much use of videos and not enough use of reading for many of the subjects. Many of the topics could have been better explained from a book or article than watching many of the webinars from Harvard or pycon in my opinion. Those videos were often very lengthy and hard to follow along with and I found myself skimming through them. They didnt have decent background information before the these videos that would delve into complex subjects sometimes. This is my biggest complaint to be honest. 
- Some of the assignments needed better instructions such as the databricks miniproject. I know trying to figure something out yourself is the best way to learn but when you dont have the 
preknowledge on something so new to you it could be frustrating

Summary:
Springboard was exactly what I needed as someone coming from a background in business and who had next to zero technical skills such as coding. I landed a role as a  contingent worker  at Facebook as a business data analyst. Without a masters degree or more extensive work experience in tech working with data, i still havent been well suited for a data scientist position, so I'm supplementing this with starting a masters degree program in data scientist, but I believe if you already have a masters in any field and or have remotely relevant experience working with data, a masters degree wont be needed to land a data scientist position like I think is needed for me. Springboard is overall an excellent program to learn. 

After getting my Ph.D. last year, I started to study about data science and get some online certificates. However since I had a full-time job as an Electrical Engineer, it was pretty hard to find the right materials to study or build my portfolio in Github. I got lost after a few months, and there was no support and feedback.  When I found the Springboard career track program, I found it a matching base on my interest and my background. The  1:1 mentor calls every week, was excellent support and pushed for me. The other advantages were about the four mock interviews that Springboard provide to get us ready for the real interviews. 
I recommend this course to people who have a good background in coding and have some knowledge about machine learning since it is an intense program and you have to invest proper time and effort in 6-8 months. 

Springboard was great with providing a clear path to learn about data science. The course is well laid out and progresses naturally, building on previous concepts. The 1:1 mentor time is critical in getting things clarified and individualized help, make sure you get the most of it by knowing what you want to discuss. The course is designed for 6 months but if you have limited to no coding experience expect to put in more time. Great support from the staff and career coaches as well. I came from a physical science background, so was lucky to be familiar with a lot of the math and statistics the course covers, but others may find having to spend extra time on that as well. Being able to work on projects that you have interest in is also a great way to make it more exciting.

Overall I had a good experience. Springboard uses other online courses, like Bootcamp, to teach you. My mentor experience was very good, he was very helpful and made my experience much better. I reccommend prior experience with Python or R otherwise the 6 month timeline is difficult to achieve.

This bootcamp really provides you with the necessary tools to learn from the basics and provides you with many outlets of support. It can get a little tempting to start slacking when you work all online but if you put the time and effort into the curriculum, you will be able to come away with a much broader sense of understanding along with technical skills.

I just completed my "data science career track". This "track" took me a point which I would not be able to reach by myself. To me, the main difference of a bootcamp is mentor support. My mentor was Jeremy Cunningham. He has a high-level real-world experience and he is willing to teach what he knows. He provided guidance and constructive feedbacks, and he always motivated me to develop my own strengths. I feel myself lucky to be mentored by him.

Springboard has a great curriculum. I found my Mentor's feedback invaluable. He’s very analytical and thoughtful about it, and is realistic about what is achievable. He is very talented. It’s a really useful experience.

I compared a lot of bootcamps before I decided to pursue my data science journey with Springboard, and I am very happy with my decision. 
I graduated with a major in bioinformatics and worked in research laboratory, so had very little data science experience when I started with the program. Although, I did come in with prior programming and statistics experience which definitely helped me in the first month of the bootcamp. 
The curriculum is very well designed with nicely curated material. It teaches you the most important skills that a person transitioning into DS would require, but at the same time gives you the flexibility to work on projects and pursue the learning journey with a bit of autonomy.
The mentoring was also a great experience, it was just the right amount of support that I needed - my mentor provided motivation to keep rolling and was very helpful when I was feeling stuck, and also provided insightful feedback. 
My over all experience was amazing and this program helped me make my transition into data science without a CS or math major and helped me feel confident about my skills. It is a great program for anyone who wants to transition into data science or just hone their skills further. 

Overall, the content of the boot camp was directly useful in preparing for data science interviews. I accepted a full-time data science position in the Bay Area recently after 3 months of searching while also having a full-time job. Obviously, you must keep your expectations realistic and be honest about your skill level when transitioning to data science. I had to work on more coding problems via Leet Code and gain speed in completing data science challenges, which was beyond what the course could help me on.

I would certainly recommend the course to those who have technical degrees (I had two engineering degrees up to the masters level) already and just need the extra bump in skills to break into data science. For those from less technical backgrounds, a traditional academic program might be a better alternative because it may be harder to convince those in the industry that you're capable of deeply understanding how the machine learning models actually work from what I've heard.

I enrolled in the Springboard Data Science Career Track on December of 17, completed April 19. Due to life circumstances, I had to freeze and extend my completion date during the latter half of 2018. When I returned, I made sure I kept the same mentor as that was an absolutely highlight of this experience. I was working full-time while enrolled.

Pro:
Mentor relationship

Con:
Depth of coursework

My mentor was simply superb, this was in my opinion the best feature from this program that differs itself from others. Having a professional data scientist with working experience to offer insight concurrently while the course progresses enhanced the learning experience, I was able to bounce questions and solicit feedback both from course content and my perfornce freely and openly on a weekly basis. This has helped fuel my growth tremendously.

Although, in my opinion, I wish there was stronger emphasis and more depth offered on the machine learning portion of the coursework. For those who are curious, the way Springboard structures their coursework follows the format of data science work flow: Familiarization with programming -> Data Wrangling -> Exploratory Data Analysis/Visualization -> Statistical Inferences -> Modeling/Machine Learning -> Delivery of Results/Implementation. This flow offers a very good broad perspectives on what a Data Scientist does, but I was left craving a bit more material on the depth of Machine Learning models, such as the math and science behind some of the methodologies and the tools used.

In terms of Job Assistance, I thought the career advisors I worked with provided good feedback. However, I thought a lot of the resume and cover letters support are readily available online already, and that the job opportunities within Springboard I noticed are more relevant for students in the SF Bay Area and NYC. For those not living in the two areas, the process will not be noticably easier.

I joined the data science career track last summer and completed the whole program in March 2019. The experience with their career coach is really great and helpful. I learned a lot of skills about how to approach the companies and cultivate myself to be a strong candidate in the job market. The courses provided by the program are not really the best for people who have not a lot of experience with data science area. Also, some of the courses are not really up to date and the materials of the courses are not easy to be found. Besides the courses from the program, I need to find other resources instead. As for the mentor, I think it is also a great sell from the program. It is great to have a 1:1 personal mentor. I learned a lot of industrial experience and how to become a data scientist what companies are looking for. Just a tiny complaint about the mentor experience is that a well-experienced industrial expert sometimes is hard to understand why an entry-level person would be stuck in a simple question (to them).  Overall, I like the program a lot because I have a schedule to follow and it is pretty organized.

I was completing my PhD in geophysics and I started my online course on Data Science with Springboard. One of the things I really liked the curriculum it stated with the basics and then went difficult. The curriculum helped me to understand the bigger picture of Data Science. I really appreciate the mentoring part of the program. It really helped me to get a good understanding of various topics in Data science. Without mentoring, I would not be confident in communicating with the Data science group. I shared my articles in Medium and LinkedIn and got acknowledged by the Data science group. I am still working with the career service to land a job as a Data Scientist. I can honestly say that I would not be able to make a transition from geophysicist to data scientist so fast without Springboard. Also special mention to the staff, incredibly responsive and helpful.