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How I Learned Data Science in 175 Days as A Complete Beginner
Data analysis of my Dataquest learning curve
The first and most frequently asked question from beginners of a course is probably: how long does it take to finish this course? I know I had that question when I started the Data Scientist in Python path on Dataquest.
Paradoxically, that’s a question you won’t have an answer to unless you’ve finished the course thus no longer need an answer. However, I'm going to attempt to provide some “clues” I gathered from parsing and analyzing the weekly accomplishment emails from Dataquest, in addition to the Data Scientist in Python curriculum I scraped from the Dataquest website.
Tribute to The Dataquest Community
Before I get carried away with numbers, I want to pay tribute to the awesome Dataquest Community, the best online learning community in my experience. It has been a year of grief, but in the Dataquest community, I see people from all over the world trying their best to learn and help each other every day.
One of my biggest incentives to do this project is to encourage beginners on this journey by giving them a peek into the road ahead. Please keep in mind though, the time and effort to complete this course is highly relevant to personal situations. I will briefly go over mine later in this article.
Special thanks to Otávio Simões Silveira and his amazing project How web scraping helped me go from learning to teaching.
“Clues” to Questions Every Beginner Has
To better understand the answers, I want to first clarify what “Steps”, “Courses” and “Missions” are on Dataquest with a screenshot:
Now, let’s get some answers!
- How many days did it take for me to finish the Data Scientist in Python path on Dataquest? (timespan, including intervals I didn’t spend on studying)
175 days. From June 19th, 2020 to December 11th, 2020.
