My name is Andrea, I am from Ecuador. I studied Telecommunication engineering and in some classes I was the only woman there. That was the norm in technology or IT related careers. But not in this Bootcamp. We women are the majority and that’s awesome.

This forth week has started very well. Our programming knowledge increases every day. We finished basic R coding classes, we have learned Numpy and Pandas in Python and we started working with SQL. Now I feel more confident about . The Bootcamp is really intense and demanding and sometimes we finish classes really tired after many hours of study, but it is worth it because we are learning really interesting topics.

Mondays are always quite fascinating because we have Resilience class. It’s a time to calm down and stop for a moment. We did a really tough meditation in couples that was really revealing. I get the chance to know my classmates a little better. This week Rodrigo wanted us to compromise in meditating at least 5 minutes a day. I think that is really important to learn how to handle stress.

We began working with the data set assigned to my team for the Capstone Project and we were able to apply our programming knowledge in a real case. We started to perform an EDA (Exploratory Data Analysis) to see data insights and get our firsts impressions.

We have realized that one of the most important things is to understand the problem to be solved and therefore we have to read a lot about the case to give the client a solution.

A highlight of the week was the Lunch and Learn with David Rey, Chief Data Officer at Idealista, one of the main real estate web sites in Spain. He explained to us the transformation Idealista went through until it became a data-driven organization and how that has contributed significantly to improve financial indicators.  David explained some predictive models divided by cities and zones that he and his team have developed and showed us some dashboard with real estate indicators.

He told us that one of the biggest challenges in companies is to convince managers of the need to have a data scientist team to develop advanced analytics.

In my current job at a telecommunication company I work in strategic planning, development of KPIs and data analysis. All the knowledge acquired in the bootcamp will substantially improve the way I do my job. I have so many ideas to be applied. I can’t wait to study Machine Learning.

It has been an incredible experience to go back to study after so many years. My classmates are the best. In classes we help each other with the exercises, share interesting links through Whatsapp, laugh and learn Spanish slang.

Joining the bootcamp at IE was an excellent decision since I’m not only improving my technical knowledge but also my soft skills.