Can I learn Data Science and Machine Learning without a CS Degree?
My journey to learning data science and machine learning without a background in computer science.
Who am I?
My name is Kristian Roopnarine and I currently work part time at the New York Hall of Science. I graduated in December 2018 with a M.S. in Chemistry and sometime in March/April I started to teach myself to code.
Getting into the programming world
It was pretty intimidating learning to code, at least in the beginning. I assumed that it wouldn’t be possible because I have no computer science background. But instead of giving up I reached out to many of my colleagues who know programmers or are programmers themselves and they helped give me a starting point. I bought a couple courses on Udemy.com and did some research on a good language to start learning and I chose Python. My goal at first was to create a website to showcase my thesis research for my M.S. in Chemistry. It turned out that I really liked the process of programming and problem solving. I spent countless hours learning new things about websites and eventually learned how to deploy my own website kristianroopnarine.com with Django. I taught myself JavaScript, CSS, and HTML to spice up my website and to have the ability to really personalize it. I really liked the Python language for its simple syntax and it’s abundance of libraries and documentation. I wanted to figure out how I can take Python to the next level.
Research on Python Careers
I started doing research on the different career paths for Python programmers and it always narrowed down to a couple of fields:
- Web Development
- Data Science
- Machine learning
- Artificial Intelligence
I liked web development with Python but I didn’t have that passion to even consider it as a career. However, data science and machine learning really stood out to me. I’ve always had this curiosity to formulate hypotheses and analyze them by asking the right questions. That curiosity combined with the experience analyzing data from countless experiments in my undergraduate Chemistry degree and independent thesis research for my M.S. degree, helped me develop a skill set for data analytics that I believe can propel me into a data science career. Now the question is, can I do it in under 6 months?
My plan
I did research on some of the information a data scientist needs to understand just to get an idea of where to start. The following plan is not final and will definitely grow as I learn more about data science and machine learning. I’ve adapted this outline from a combination of Siraj Raval and Python Programmer on youtube about learning data science. They list free links to everything I will mention below.
I will be following Siraj Ravals outline for “Learn Machine Learning in 3 months” for the first month as outlined:
- Week 1 Linear Algebra https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathemati...
- Week 2 Calculus https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
- Week 3 Statistics https://www.edx.org/course/introducti...
- Week 4 Algorithms https://www.coursera.org/courses?lang...
Then I’ll switch over to a book called Python Data Science Handbook and read the first 4 chapters for an introduction to data manipulation and visualization with Python.
Siraj Raval has a playlist on the math behind machine learning called Math of Intelligence and a playlist dedicated to Tensorflow which I will watch after reading the previous book. Finally I will take this course:
- Intro to ML (Udacity) https://eu.udacity.com/course/intro-t..
Every week I will try to pump out a new Python project to keep practicing my coding while following this outline. Then while I’m learning about machine learning I’ll reinforce that information by starting on machine learning projects…lot’s of them. I believe these projects will be important not only for the learning process but also to show companies and employers that I can perform as a data scientist.
I will post an update every week about my progress and what I’ve learned!
