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I’m in the final stretch of Correlation One’s Data Science For All (DS4A): Empowerment Program and I thought it’d be a great time for me to share my experiences with the program with all of you!

Bottom line: DS4A is an incredible opportunity to learn data science skills completely for free. While the program is a big time commitment, the personal and professional growth I’ve experienced over the course of the program is stunning. DS4A connects a community of Fellows from similar backgrounds with each other and gives them access to top-tier educators and educational materials and also to employers that are very eager to hire DS4A graduates.

DS4A is an excellent way to supercharge your career, acquire new skills in data analytics, and make lasting connections with folks that are passionate about increasing diversity and representation in the tech and AI spaces.

I very highly recommend it!

The Application Process: The online form to apply to DS4A is fairly short, and you’ll need to send them your resume/CV as part of the application. They also ask for links to your socials (LinkedIn, personal website, Twitter handle, etc., if applicable). Finally, the application includes a short skills assessment (more on that below). After completing the Skills Assessment, depending on your performance, someone from Correlation One will contact you to arrange a short interview.

The Skills Assessment: I’ve received a lot of questions about this part of the application in particular, so I want to give you some idea about what’s involved. The Skills Assessment is a 90-minute assessment, and while I don’t remember any specific questions (and would not be allowed to share the questions even if I did!), in general, the questions focused on different ways to interpret data, and some asked specifically for your interpretation of different datasets/tables/figures (sales data, consumer information, etc.). While I often don’t think about these kinds of data in my day-to-day (because I study crabs, haha), I actually found the assessment enjoyable, and it allowed me to challenge myself in a new and interesting way! But an important note: once you finish a question and move to the next one, you will not be allowed to go back to previous questions! For that reason, it is to your advantage to take as much time as you need on each question — I ended up completing it with 30 minutes to spare and I wish I would’ve spent more time on some earlier questions!

The Interview: My interview lasted around 10 minutes, and I was asked why I was participating in the program, what I hoped to gain from it, and how I would balance participating in the program with my PhD work. I dressed up pretty for it, but my interviewer was extremely chill, so it certainly didn’t feel like a high pressure interview experience!

The Program: DS4A lasts for 13 weeks, and most of the hands-on instruction occurs on Saturday mornings from 7AM – 5PM PT (10AM – 8PM ET). During those hours, there are a few hours of live instruction via Jupyter Notebook and Zoom, guest speakers from various industry sponsors of the program, team meetings with your assigned TAs, group work, and Icebreaker socials. We mostly code in Python, but recently, we’ve also begun to learn some SQL (we’re on Week 9 so far).

To receive the DS4A Certificate in Data Analytics, you have to:

• Attend most of the Saturday sessions,
• Complete three Extended Cases (colloquially called ECs) which are guided practical assignments where you work through analyzing a particular data set using the Python skills you obtained during the Saturday sessions and draw conclusions based on your analyses. You need to pass all three with a Satisfactory grade or better — to pass an EC with a Satisfactory, you have to make an honest effort on at least half of the questions, even if the answers aren’t right, and
• Complete a Final Project with your team.

There is also an option to receive an Honors Certificate in Data Analytics — to complete DS4A with Honors, you have to attend all the Saturday lectures (or get permission for your absence), and receive 2 “Good” scores (for completing all of the EC’s exercises with an honest effort, even if the answers aren’t right) and at least one “Excellent” (for completing all of the EC’s exercises with an honest effort and getting 2/3rds of the exercises correct) on the three ECs. I was also recently named one of the Gilead Sciences Distinguished Scholars for the program — hooray! 😄

The Final Project: …is incredibly open-ended! You and your team can work on whatever data science project interests you. Your TAs are excellent resources for helping you refine and scope your project so it isn’t an overwhelming task, but most of the idea formation will come from you and your team. My team wanted to tackle and understand the legacy of redlining and environmental racism for our project, but there’s a wide amount of project diversity in my cohort.

Career Development: Correlation One has gone to great lengths to expose the DS4A participants to as many diverse job opportunities as possible. They’ve launched a platform to connect interested employers directly with DS4A Fellows job profiles, they’ve coordinated several career fairs throughout the program where employers come to speak directly to us about their organizations and open opportunities, and they maintain a jobs board that Fellows can plug into whenever they like to apply to positions that interest them. It’s an incredible resource! Other Fellows in the program have also been sharing opportunities from their personal networks with others in the program via Slack, so as a Fellow, you will truly be inundated with opportunities. Plus, as a DS4A Fellow, your application will be fast-tracked if you apply to any of the jobs offered by the program’s industry partners. If you’re looking to break into the data science/data analytics field, participating in this program will throw open so many doors for you!

The Time Commitment: This is largely up to you. I think, like most things, what you put into this program will be what you’ll get out of it. I’m a perfectionist and a completionist (perhaps to my eternal detriment 😅), so in addition to the work involved in pursuing the Honors certificate, I’ve also found that I’ve been putting a lot of time into our Final Project, which actually deeply interests me because of its potential impact on social justice. As a result, I’ve been spending a lot more time on data science work each week than I was anticipating. But it’s weird… I’ve spent so many evenings, music cranked up, Earl Grey tea at the ready, excitedly digging through open source data, and I’ve truly been loving it. I really didn’t expect to enjoy data science as much as I have been, but there it is! Who knew! 😄

All in all, I’m so happy that I’ve had a chance to participate in this program. I went from knowing absolutely nothing about Python (“How do I even make a dataframe? How do I draw a bar graph? What the heck is pandas and rubber duck debugging, and why do they all sound so flippin’ cute?!”) to merging several types of open-source data, subsetting large datasets to obtain points of interest, statistically analyzing the information, and drawing up very pretty graphics to display my findings — all in nine short weeks! Incredible. And while I already have an excellent opportunity lined up after I finish my PhD (more on this soon! 🤩), I’m definitely thinking hard about how to integrate what I learned into my science moving forward.

That’s all, folks! Please shoot me a message/comment if you have any other questions, and let me know if you decide to apply!

⭐ UPDATE: I did it! I graduated with honors from the program! Woohoo! ⭐

Click to access honors_cert.pdf

-Vicky