As one of the people who have gone through Insight Data Science, I can share my experiences to this interesting discussion.
For someone looking to learn development skills, Insight really isn't the best option. You are expected to be able to code fairly well before the program. In addition, the work load is intense. I generally worked 10-12 hour days (including weekends) for most of the unpaid program. With my wife working full time, the only way we made it work with two kids was taking advantage of some very generous grandparents. That said, the program was fantastic and it was a great way to transition out of academia. I learned a lot and had a built in network for my new career as a data scientist. During Insight, you create a data product which is simply a website that solves some sort of problem using data. These problems should be something that people can relate to, which makes explaining what the code does much easier. I find that scientific code or contributions to FOSS projects are very useful, but they can definitely sometimes be hard to explain to a recruiter or interviewer when you are looking for a job outside of academia. My academic research coding was pretty technical and involved a lot of neuroscience and molecular biology background before I could even begin explaining the code. During Insight, I made a website that ranked addresses in NYC based on how good they were for kids. Both projects involved a lot of coding, but my Insight project was much easier to talk about during interviews to both technical and non-technical people. I think scientific coding and FOSS contributions are great and important, but good software that solves a more approachable problem that you can tell a good story around is better when looking for an industry position outside of your academic field. On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 4:08 PM, Greg Wilson < [email protected]> wrote: > Hi Terri; thanks for your mail. > > On 2016-02-28 1:46 PM, Terri Yu wrote: > >> I was just trying to suggest that for academics who don't have the CS >> background and software internships, getting involved in the open source >> community would be a good way to develop software skills and find a >> community that will support someone with an atypical background. Also, >> it's not that easy to jump into an open source project and start making >> contributions as someone who is new to the community and new to software. >> Suggesting to someone that they should go make open source contributions to >> pad their resume, without giving them any guidance or even explaining to >> them the FOSS ethos -- that seems a tad irresponsible. That's why I put >> the emphasis on joining the FOSS community rather than focusing on making >> contributions. No open source project maintainer likes getting random pull >> requests. >> > > I agree, and that's good advice -I hope that Software and Data Carpentry > are good communities to start with. We may not have much in the way of > software for people to hone their skills on, but I'd like to think that > doing pull requests on lessons is a gentle introduction to the workflow. > I'd be very grateful to hear from anyone whose first encounter with GitHub > (or other open source machinery) was through DC/SWC, and who then went on > to contribute to other things. > > I'd also be grateful for pointers to research development communities that > are particularly welcoming to, and have tasks accessible to, newcomers - > astro.py (http://www.astropy.org/) and rOpenSci (http://ropensci.org/) > are two that I've heard mentioned before, and there are others on our > website at http://software-carpentry.org/join/projects/. (Additions to > that list would be very welcome.) > > Finally, some of our instructors have gone through the 7-week program > offered by Insight Data Science (http://insightdatascience.com/), which > is a way to learn development skills without having to load it on top of > everything else. Stories from people who've taken part in it or similar > programs would be very welcome as well. > > > Cheers, > Greg > > -- > Dr Greg Wilson > Director of Instructor Training > Software Carpentry Foundation > >
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