Springboard: Is It Right For You?

Disclaimer: This is not endorsed by Springboard.

Hi everyone! Recently, I have been requested a handful of times if not more to talk about Springboard. Springboard is a bootcamp that is online but provides a mentor that helps you along the way, and I am proud to say that I finished it last week Friday.

A little background about me. I graduated from University of Washington with a Masters degree in computational chemistry. I had taken two classes related to data science, one was statistical methods and the other was a coding course at University of Washington when I entered into Springboard, so I knew what I was getting myself into (at least I thought I did haha).

From my background, there are two things that are most important:

1. I already knew how to code in Python.
2. I had already done two data science related projects.

So why did I decide to do Springboard?

I came in with some experience, but I was not quite sure where to go. I needed to strengthen my portfolio and get career advice. Those seem to be my weakest links.

Springboard provided me with career coaches, extra practices, and ultimately the two capstone projects.

Thus, I started DataCamp, where you get an overview on python, statistics, and machine learning. To be honest, I was not impressed with DataCamp at first sight because of some oversights (some of the lessons have incorrect answers). However, it was not until I started working on the capstone projects that I realized how powerful it is.

It was all about muscle memory. I remembered what I needed during the times I needed it in the capstone projects. So what are these capstone projects? they are basically data science projects where you do from A to Z, so from data wrangling to machine learning.

My first project was on videogames and tweet data. This project investigates the correlation between publisher continent, number of tweets to sales, and ultimately be able to predict the weekly sales for the following week. Publishers usually were located on USA and Europe. Using the best machine learning method, AdaBoostRegressor with a RandomForestRegressor as a base estimator, I was able to predict the unit sales of videogames by name and console for the next four weeks with a 0.375 accuracy. See this link for more information.

My second project was based upon StackOverflow and the post tagging. As a heavy user of StackOverflow, I see plenty of articles and sometimes I see tags that do not quite describe the posts. With this project, I wanted to investigate the methods behind the recommendation engine to possibly find one that predicts tags fairly well. See this link for more information.

These two projects build my confidence in my abilities as a data scientist. Springboard provided me with the mentorship when I was stuck during these projects. When I was finishing up the second project, it was amazing to hear my mentor say that I was fully capable of finishing up the project.

Career coach made this process even easier. First, I had quite a few conversations with my career coach, where she answered my questions about LinkedIn and what my next moves would be. In addition, I had some anxiety surrounding the interview process, so I did a practice mock interview for my mock interview. She agreed to it! It was so relieving to have that chance.

Something I would like to say about the job interviews though. When I apply for positions, the types of positions I go for are software engineering or developer, data science, and data engineer. Most of those coding interviews are intense, so I did not think that their data science coding interview prepared me for those type of interviews. I would like to see more difficult coding practice interviews for those of us who want to go into a coding-heavy position.

Lastly, the job guarantee. When I interact with most people, they ask me if Springboard's job guarantee is real. It is real. The guidelines are clearly outlined when you pay and most importantly, you have to do the work to get the position.

Most importantly, you have to do the work to get the position.

Your resume is not going to get passed around the network. It will be you passing around your resume, but they still give you all of the tools that are necessary to succeed.

Want to ask anything else relating to Springboard? Feel free to contact me :)