My name is Argenis. I am originally from Venezuela, but I have been living in Chile since January 2016. My experience has been centered around strategy and operations, so I have worked a lot in the data and analytics side of business, rather than the technical side. However, as an electrical engineer, I do have a fairly technical background.

While working as a project leader within an IT and management consulting firm, I decided that I wanted to improve my technical skills. I believed that broadening my knowledge base would allow me to go above and beyond traditional analytics to implement more advanced analytics into my tasks. At the same time, I wanted to sharpen my ability to identify risks and support my team. Finally, I hoped to acquire new tools that I could use to help my team’s performance, while developing and proposing new ideas to our clients.

These four weeks have proven to be both educational and enjoyable. Although the program is demanding and increasingly intense, it has been a great experience for me. I am learning alongside some amazing classmates; the diversity in the classroom in terms of gender, background and nationalities creates a hugely enriching environment.

The program is everything I could have imagined and more. I’ll now attempt to summarize everything we did during the fourth week to provide a closer look at this intense program.

Week four began with math and statistics. We had our first contact with machine learning algorithms, such as Association Rules and Naive Bayes, and analyzed some of the basic concepts in statistics, looking at Histogram and Boxplot. On Thursday, we had another Python exam. This time we were tested on the Python Data Analysis Library (or Pandas), which provides special data structures and operations for the manipulation of numerical tables. Alongside the exams, we also had the chance to start exploring data acquisition in Python and SQL.

We were also able to get some career advice from Ricardo Mesquita, Head of Immersive Learning here at IE. In addition, we had the opportunity to visit the office of a well-known consulting firm and we started coding with R. This is the first step in the exploratory data analysis for our final capstone projects. We will also be working alongside financial market platforms to get real-time data as part of this project.

It has been an amazing week and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next.