Hey, I am Remzi, a Romanian living and working in Kraków (Poland) and a bootcamper excited to learn about Data Science. It was the 25th of September when I was flying to Madrid, really early in the morning. I have done various mental exercises to imagine how the bootcamp will  be “in reality”, but no such exercise could have prepared me for the months to come.

And here I am, 9th week passed, on to the home stretch to finalise our projects and get the best out of the last two weeks. It’s only two weeks, yes, but at the pace we’re learning it is in fact making a difference in terms of Machine Learning algorithms you know and experiences you accumulate.

A few days ago, Ivan, who is the bootcamp Academic Director, entrepreneur and our Machine Learning teacher, opened Binfluencer doors to us. He shared ideas and challenged us to find solutions for some of their day-to-day issues.

“What if you were given the task to determine the language on various Instagram accounts? How would you approach it?” This is just one of the many questions we love to tackle and yes, the answer is within the R or Python libraries.

We went further this week and studied the Artificial Neural Network algorithm that has a large applicability in handwriting recognition. As we are progressing with consolidating our hard coding skills we are at the stage when we need to remind ourselves the goals of our projects and the overall bootcamp experience.

Who will be benefiting from our projects and what’s in it for them? We learned to communicate our findings through interactive visualizations using tools such as Shiny or dygraphs packages in R.

We spent the last couple of weeks structuring our projects into a “Storytelling with Data” framework shared with us by our BCG mentors. The week culminated with the  first “dress rehearsal” for the Demo Day . We were given constructive feedback by our peers and mentors that will come in handy not only on Demo Day but for the many presentations we will have ahead of us.

I can say that we have come a such a long way and these last few weeks will be glueing everything together. We do not have standalone exercises any longer, we have real-life projects and clients that we constantly interact with, ask for feedback and give our own recommendations to.

In retrospective, so far the bootcamp meant for me 10000+ lines of code in R and Python, Machine Learning, master classes with industry leaders in IT, a capstone project in a completely new industry to me, but above all, a functional team that we’ve built in less than 9 weeks.

Throughout these weeks, team work has proven to be one of the key factors that can decide the success of your project. The  upcoming days will be challenging,  yet exciting as always.