My experience at Flatiron School
Tags: datascience, python, coding, career
Published: 2023-05-22 02:22:35


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Disclaimer: since Flatiron is so awesome, they keep reviewing their data and they are constantly re-thinking and restructuring the different courses and services offered, adapting to what helps and doesn’t help, what works and what doesn’t work.
Some of the things I mention here might not be structured in the same way anymore, even if the core content of the classes and the structure itself of the course is the same. Visit [flatironschool.com](https://flatironschool.com/) to see what the school offers and what has changed since this post and since I enrolled.

### What I loved

I loved the things I learnt. I loved the flexibility and support I received. I loved all the different tools offered (even if I didn’t get to use them all). I loved the material that was presented and that in a year's time (and it could have been less if you don’t have a schedule as busy as mine) I am ready for a whole new beautiful and challenging competitive career... starting almost from zero!

### I was coming from…

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A background in physics including a master's degree focusing on solid state matter. 3 years working experience as office manager in the healthcare industry. 3 years spent at home with my sons.
When my younger one was almost ready to start to go to school I started to wonder: what do I want to do when he’s going to be in school and I’m going to be able to work again?
I knew I wanted to reconnect to my science background but I wasn’t sure how (unfortunately the search “physicist” for a job on Indeed doesn’t really bring impressive results). I had a chance to take one class of coding during my bachelor's degree (C++) and I didn’t like it because it felt abstract. It wasn’t connected to anything concrete that I was interested in.

Fast forward roughly 8 years after completing my studies, spending three years in a healthcare role and three years home as a stay at home mom (most underestimated job out there by the way - I strongly believe it should count as a master's degree at least). 
Now I wonder what would I love to do? I receive a great suggestion from a friend to start by looking up positions on job listing websites, read as many as I can and select my 10 favorite ones. Guess what? I do it and 7 out of 10 are data science positions.
And the interesting thing is reading it from the position description, coding sounded much more interesting than the idea that I had of it back in college.
At that point I was actually excited to start coding if what it meant was that I look at real data about real things and people and actually learn something from it (and possibly even help others because of it!). This results in being able to offer better services and learning from what we have seen so far in every direction and every field.

I got excited about data science. Very. Simultaneously, I find out from a close friend how a mutual friend of ours happens to be switching careers to data science! 
He also had no prior experience. He was actually a high school theology teacher, with 3 little kids and a wife who works full time. And he was able to start and finish the bootcamp at Flatiron School remotely while still working full time and being a present and loving husband and dad.
That’s it. If he could do it so can I!
I reach out and we meet up. He is super excited to share his experience of the program and answers all my questions. To say the least - he was very very satisfied at Flatiron and strongly recommended it. 

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### What Flatiron School has to offer
Here are only some of the pros I found:
A new cohort is starting every month. They offer in-person classes or self-paced remote programs.
They have a campus in Manhattan and one in Denver.
They offer classes in software engineering, data science, cybersecurity and product design.
The school offers different payment plans, including also starting to pay for the course once you complete it.
They offer a flexible schedule, in which you are always followed and assisted by a coach. However, all the material is accessible to you remotely and you can do everything on your own at your own time and pace. There are lessons, labs, videos of recorded lectures, quizzes and projects.

Flatiron also puts you in touch with a whole community of students, and there are all sorts of channels to join with meetings organized via Zoom for students to meet and help each other with the work, or simply mingle and get to know new people in your field.
If you ever have a problem or a question - besides reaching out to classmates or your instructor - there are also technical coaches available after-hours.
So if you were like me in the first months - always working in the evenings and on weekends, when supposedly no one else does, there is always someone available to help and answer your questions (and here I have to officially thank Ashley for the 3 evenings she spent with me to try to make MongoDB run on my machine).
Other services I didn’t get to take advantage of but that sounded very helpful: student advisors (for any non technical problem or concern you might have), guided practices and office hours.
I was lucky enough that having studied in Italy I have extensive experience in oral examinations and thus am used to presenting/public speaking. But since the 5 projects with which you are evaluated include a non-technical presentation, the school offers practices for students that want to improve their communication skills. You do not even need to pre-book these sorts of  practices and office hours are both offered as zoom calls that you just hop in and someone is there to help you.

After understanding all the support the school has to offer, on top of the high level material and wonderful reputation, I decided this is for me.


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### My journey
I officially applied to the school, looked into their different financial options, took the entry test, had an entry interview and got accepted!
I also actually won a scholarship for women in tech (and they offer other scholarships as well).
There is some pre-work to do mostly in math and logic and intro to coding in Python.
I chose the remote self-paced because I was still home with my young son. That’s right. My son had not started school yet, and if I wanted to go faster I could have just waited for him to start school, but the truth is, once I found Flatiron I was so excited to start that I enrolled in April, instead of waiting until September. I simply couldn’t wait to start this new adventure.
When the classes began, I had an introductory call with my classmates that were also starting on my same date. While some in my cohort went at a much more rapid pace I ended up becoming close to those who were similar to my timeline - especially my girl Eva who has been with me all along even presenting her final capstone project on the same exact day as me!
Through this whole course we covered so many topics so here is just a quick summary even though this is just a glance at the breadth of the curriculum:

### The data science curriculum

#### Phase 1: 
Basic Python
Terminal and Git
Pandas
SQL
MongoDB
Folium
NumPy
Matplotlib
Seaborn

#### Phase 2:
Combinatronics and probability
Distributions
Hypothesis Testing
Bayesian Statistic
Simple Linear Regression
Multiple Linear Regression

#### Phase 3:
Object Oriented Programming
Linear Algebra
Calculus
Regularization
Logistic Regression
Classification Metrics
Decision Trees
K Nearest Neighbors
Bayesian Classification
Model Tuning and Pipelines
Ensemble Methods:
Bagging Random Forests
Grid SearchCV
Gradient Boosting
XG Boost

My project was a classification model, built using Random Forests, to identify most determining factor in COVID-19 hospitalizations.
Find the full project on my repository:
https://github.com/MNLKuzmin/Covid

####Phase 4:
PCA
Recommendation Systems
Clustering
Time Series
Big Data and Pyspark
Natural Language Processing
Neural Networks
Amazon Web Services

My project was a time series analysis in Electrical Energy Production in the US with Natural Gas.
Find the whole project at the following link:
https://github.com/MNLKuzmin/USEnergy_Generation 

####Phase 5 capstone project:
This was a Convolutional Neural Network to detect skin cancer. 
See this [link](https://dev.to/mnlkuzmin/skin-cancer-detection-with-convolutional-neural-networks-3mh1) for my blog post and for the GitHub repo of my project:
https://github.com/MNLKuzmin/SkinCancerDetection

Finally I would like to thank a few people that helped me and accompanied me during this amazing journey:
Eva, for being there with me in this adventure with all the ups and downs that came along the way!
Other classmates met on the way: Heath, Joshua, Emily, Luke and David for our zoom calls, bouncing ideas off of each other and supporting each other navigating this great journey.
Matt and Morgan - my coaches. For their help and support and patience in front of all my questions!
Mark for the great reviews of my projects. For always giving detailed and helpful feedback and always wanting to teach me something new!
Thank you Flatiron School for this amazing opportunity.
I can’t wait to see what lies ahead!