Hi everyone! My name is Konrad, and I have a background in economics. While working as an investment banker, I encountered various FinTech companies that employ data science to generate business advantages. I wanted to learn more, so I turned to the IE Data Science Bootcamp to gain a thorough understanding of both the technical and mathematical foundations of data science.

The third week of the bootcamp can be summarized as an ever-increasing accumulation of data-driven brain teasers. In our R coding course, we’re preparing for our second exam at the end of the week. While our tasks are becoming more complex, we’ve studied a number of packages from the tidyverse, as well as faster and more nimble data tables that will help us tackle future challenges.

In Python, we wrote our first exam on Monday. Naturally, we were all thrilled… But in the end it was a positive experience! As the exam included random walks and simple digital image processing, it aligned well with the overall theme of the week. This was definitely a tough exam. Now, we’re leaving NumPy behind and moving on to pandas, the heart of data manipulations in Python.

Our Math & Stats course continues to be highly interesting. We’ve come across our first two touchpoints with machine learning algorithms: association rules and naive Bayes. By studying these areas, we’re already catching a glimpse of the more advanced machine learning concepts that lie ahead.

Finally, Javier Tejedor, a machine learning specialist at Endesa (a Spanish energy giant), spoke to us in this week’s Master Class. We discussed various machine learning approaches in the context of fraud detection. His practical insights into the world of data science and his presentation on code, deep neural networks and gradient boosting on decision trees impressed everyone.

Before beginning the bootcamp, I was skeptical about how much I could really pick up in such a short amount of time. Thanks to the immersive nature of the program, the committed instructors and my phenomenal fellow bootcampers, I’m amazed at how much we’ve already learned in just a few weeks.

I can’t wait to see what’s next in the bootcamp!

Best,

Konrad

Interested in learning more about our Data Science Bootcamps? Click here!