Harvard’s Advance Python for Data Science -My Review

When I started my job as a hospitalist, I was very excited about the week on/week off schedule. Typically, most hospitalists put in 80 to 84 hours in one week, which is then followed by the next week off. I traveled a lot during my off weeks but then I reached a point where I felt it’s time to do something a little more productive. I was spending a lot of time on Quora, reading not only about “ten most creepy pictures” and “how does Zuckerburg spend his billions”, but also about new technologies. I got really interested in natural language processing and the concepts behind it, interested enough that I decided to learn python. This was followed by a bunch of amazon orders of books like “learn python in one day”. I felt that python is very intuitive. Even for someone like me, with no background in computer science and minimal experience in any programming language, it was quite easy to learn. The best way to learn any skill is by practicing it therefore I decided to work on some projects. I was able to come up with website to scrape twitter and Instagram to hashtags appearing along with the user provided hashtag or phrase (tags4insta). Working with online tutorials, I came up with a project for work, extracting meaningful information from patient feedback comments using NLP. I was able to get it published in a reputable journal. The publication really encouraged me to learn more and decided to actually pursue a degree in data science, believing being a doctor, I have a slightly different perspective of the immense healthcare related data in a hospital than somebody who is not that closely linked to healthcare.

After some research, I found many programs offering online graduate degrees in data science. My two favorites were UC Berkley and Harvard Extension School Data Science Degree. However, I decided to go with HES mainly because of the cost, and the option to take courses on campus. The admission process is rather simple. You take two admission courses and if you do well, you get into the masters program. One of the two courses was Advance Python for Data Science (CSCI E-29). I was pretty excited about that course and felt rather comfortable about python. However, little did I know, that I knew very little.

It seems like the course is in great demand. I missed registration once because it filled up in 2…