NYC Data Science Academy

I recommend this bootcamp to anyone who wants to transition into the field of Data Science. Before this bootcamp I was a process engineer for a large North American steel company. With the rate of growth in the technology industry, I knew it was time to transition to a new career, and I could have not chosen a better place to do so than NYC Data Science Academy.
Instructors:
The Instructors were amazing. Chris is extremely knowledgable in statistics, and his passion for teaching really shines through. With every lecture, he not only shows mastery of the material but also the best way to teach complex materials to a class of non-programmers.
Luke goes above and beyond to describe the theory behind the algorithms. His work ethic is shown through the countless hours he has stayed to review lessons with students and belief in continuous improvement.
The TAs (Shu, Zeyu) were immense help, and had very good knowledge of big data applications (Hadoop ecosystem, front end work, SQL database design, etc.)
Curriculum:
The bootcamp offers a good basis for understanding prediction models and when to use which types of algorithms. There just isn't enough time to cover all aspects of statistics and the many branches of prediction models. Both R and Python are taught here, which allows for great flexibility. While this bootcamp is rigorous, self discipline is required to fully delve into algorithms and build impressive products for your portfolio (natural language processing, image recognition, recommendation engines, etc. ; these advanced topics are covered briefly but enough for you to take the reins). All in all I believe the bootcamp set me on the right foot into the industry.
Job Assistance:
While there is some assistance, the majority of the legwork work is still on the student to be duly diligent - sending out applications, getting interviews, networking and working their way up towards their dream job. There is no easy formula for this, and you MUST continue learning (Algorithms, data architecture, and more advanced ML topics etc. ; network to find out what people in your ideal companies expect you to know) and reviewing material even after the bootcamp to prepare for interviews. 

Attending the NYC Data Science Academy 12-week Data Science Bootcamp was one of the best decisions I have made. It was instructive and rewarding. It provided a speedy career transition and enabled me to get a job within two months of graduation as a Machine Learning Data Engineer at Capital One. I will summarize my background and describe my experience at the bootcamp and why I recommend it highly.

I have a PhD in materials science, which is a blend of math, chemistry and physics. I had programmed models and simulations in Matlab, but have no formal computer science education. I switched to management consulting after the PhD to apply my analytical skills in the business world and quickly realized there is a great need for data analysis at companies. After taking the complete Data Science Specialization on Coursera, I knew I wanted to switch to data science and found the NYCDSA bootcamp to be the most comprehensive, teaching R, Python, and Big Data technologies.

I recommend this bootcamp for three reasons: quality of teachers and materials, structure, and networking, both at the bootcamp and in job placement.

It takes a lot of knowledge, experience, and hard work to distill complicated and complex topics and communicate them in a simple and understandable way. The materials presented in this bootcamp were presented that way. When I can understand statistical concepts which I had tried to understand for a long time in a matter of minutes, it means the quality of teaching and materials are excellent. During the job search, I also realized that the correct balance between breadth and depth had been selected to give us a very solid foundation on which to start a job in data science.

The teachers were exceptional. Their passion and dedication to the students were visible from day one. This was shown again and again in how hard they worked to constantly improve and expand lecture materials to how much support they gave to each individual’s success outside of class. Having them as teachers was an honor.

The structure of the bootcamp allowed an incredible amount of materials to be covered in a short amount of time. Particularly, it used both R and Python for statistical concepts and machine learning. In addition, we learned about many other tools in extra sessions designed to round out our knowledge. Big Data technologies such as Hadoop, Hive, and Spark were covered toward the end of the bootcamp. Spark was asked for often in interviews, and familiarity with it was helpful. Having five projects under your belt is exactly what you need when interviewing. I always had an example I could use to answer questions. The value of this is not to be underestimated.

Lastly, the opportunity to network was incredible. You are beginning your data science career having forged strong bonds with 35 other incredibly intelligent and inspiring people who go to work at great companies. The value of those friendships and the ability to create a strong network at the beginning of your data science career will become evident a couple years down the road.

I was fortunate enough to meet and give a presentation to managers at Spotify, at Meetups, and get connected to many hiring partners. Vivian, the founder, is a strong proponent and has an incredible network. She seemed to have a contact at almost every company I wanted to apply to. Her one-on-one evaluation of interview performance with me was very helpful. She and the rest of the staff are very dedicated to each student’s success, being clear in their purpose that this experience will change both you and your family’s lives for the better. Their hearts are in it and their dedication is clear.

If you are considering this bootcamp to get more into data science, it is exactly the accelerator you need to get your career in this field off the ground. I cannot recommend it enough.

My background is in Data Engineering and Analytics and I have been consulting for the Banking and Financial Services clients. I strongly believe that Machine Learning is the key to the Artificial Intelligence and decided to embrace this emerging trend and immerse myself in the field of Data Science.

Although there are several Data Science bootcamps that are available, NYC Data Science Academy stood out for me because of their curriculum and the strong portfolio of projects they help and empower the students to build. The portfolio of projects, Github code and the corresponding blog posts definitely help make a good impression with the interviewer and showcase the great work accomplished during the 12 week period at the academy.
It has been a truly amazing learning experience for me and definitely worth the investment that helped me advance to my next stage of career growth.

To begin with, the curriculum is quite comprehensive covering all the important Machine Learning algorithms and their fundamentals, detailed working of the algorithm,assumptions, diagnostics, pros and cons. There are regular homework exercises that allows the students to apply the knowledge that they learned in the class and solidify their understanding of the concepts. The class was very diverse and represented students who hailed from various backgrounds - Finance to Engineering to Medical sciences.

I would like to highight the quality of instructors here: All the instructors were extremely professional, technically strong and quite articulate in explaining the concepts. They were also available after hours and helped clarify the questions pertaining to homework, projects and software installation.

Regarding career development, Vivian and her team have made great efforts to help the students reach out to hiring managers and have arranged internal referrals at the firms. The Academy also provides a strong support system for the students as they start looking out for career opportunities as a Data Scientist. 

At the end of the day, You'll form great relationships not only with the instructors but with other talented students as well as everybody learns together about this exciting field. If you are thinking about uplifting your career to a whole new level and set your feet into the fantastic world of Data Science, I strongly recommend NYC Data Science Academy.

This 12-week data science bootcamp is great. The faculties have created an excellent curriculum to help you get in touch with almost everything you need to be a data scientist/engineer. Sure they did not cover every relevant theory, but remember this is only a 3-month bootcamp, which is designed to give you a "jump start," not a full-time college degree.

Besides the curriculum, most of the faculties are brilliant and always willing to help. Also, more importantly, you will make friends with people from many different backgrounds, which in my opinion is even more valuable than the course itself.

Regarding the career development, Vivian and her team have made a great effort to help us to reach out to hiring managers and arrange internal referrals. However, unlike most of my fellows in the cohort, I have a pure business background (bachelor in accounting & master in analytics). Therefore even though I have been studying DS and programming through online courses for about one and half years before joining this bootcamp, I still ended up taking a Data Analyst position instead of continuing my job hunting for the Data Scientist jobs.

At the end of the day, the cold fact is that most of the "real" data scientist positions require years of academic training and domain knowledge. The skills you have learned here at NYCDSA is definitely enough to grant you for an entry-level analytics position. However, if your target is the sexy DS title with six-digit salary, then unless you have a STEM Ph.D. or advanced degree in Computer Science / Statistics, this bootcamp will just be the start of a long journey.

My background consists of undergraduate degrees in Math, Finance and a Masters in Financial Engineering. I found this 12-week intensive bootcamp to be extrememly valuable. Due to my academic background I was already familiar with some more technical concepts, but what NYC Data Science Academy did was to provide practical, hands on training in Python and R as they pertained to Data Analysis and Machine Learning. Following my time at NYC Data Science, I had intensive interviews for Data Science - focused roles in the finance community and I felt very well prepared. The staff is knowledgeable and routinely go above and beyond the contractual teaching time in order to ensure that each student receives the most instruction for their money. 

I completed the Data Science bootcamp during the Spring of 2016. I enjoyed the Data Science bootcamp very much. It was a great experience overall.

My background is PH.D in Physics and I has more than ten years research experience as research scientist.  I am probably the most senior person in the class.

The course is very intensive and comprehensive. It covers most machine learning(ML) and data science skills:   ML in R and Python, website scraping, data visualization, big data with Spark and AWS. It is great to learn ML with both R and Python there. As I know, most boot camps don’t offer R. The school teaches a lot of stuff. It can be little overwhelming at the beginning. Everything I learned there is useful and helpful in my work. Just mention a few small things: Git, Mongodb, web scraping, AWS. I used all these skills in my work from day one.

There are enough TAs there and they are consistently available to offer help on homework, projects and software. I used windows system, the installation of some software is not straight forward.  Their great supports saved me lot of time in that way, and I can have focused on my projects and homework.

The instructors there are excellent too. They come from different background: statics, physics, and EE. Since the students come from different background, it is challenge for the lectures to deliver complicated pictures in clear way for most students.  They can present the material in a clear and logical sequence, explain complicated things in a simple way. I believed they did great job.

NYC Data Science Academy have a lot connection from local companies and this can add great values for the job seeking. I live in west coast and still got continuous supports. I worked at a start-up right after the bootcamp and then went to another  larger company a few months later.

Data Science is largely different from other science. It requires many skill sets and focuses on application much more than pure science. NYC Data Science Academy offer great opportunities for people who are seeking new career in data science in a quick way :  learn the fundamental skills of data scientist in the real world in 12 weeks.  I fell fully supported and encouraged from day one to the final job hunting.  

I have a Ph.D. in computer science, and I worked in tech industry for nearly two years. One thing I learned was that, great companies come and go, rise and fall, shine and fade. History repeats itself. However, no one can and shall beat the trend, since nothing is immortal. 

With a strong belief that machine learning is the key to the ultimate Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), I decided to embrace emerging trend and immerse myself in the field of data science, the field in which a critical piece is machine learning. In joining the NYC Data Science Academy, my motivation was simple: refresh my eyesight, build the intuitions, solidify my understanding, and meet with talented people.

It was a fantastic and rewarding journey with my fellow data scientists at the bootcamp. I will mainly concentrate on three aspects here: the curriculum, the instructors, and the like-minded peers. By no means they are complete, but hopefully they are useful for some people.

Firstly, the curriculum is comprehensive and well-tailored to balance both the breadth and depth of the data science field. Although each year there are perhaps hundreds of new machine learning algorithms devised in academic world, the essential ones are no more than ten and still widely applied in industry (see here for full list: http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/top-10-machine-learning-algorithms). Almost all of them, including their nuances, nuts and bolts, pros and cons, were covered in the curriculum and explained well by instructors who really know them.

Secondly, the team is very efficient and professional. The instructors are technically proficient, articulate, and beyond my expectations. The lecture materials were self-contained, and covered related points that a data scientist should know. Especially, I was truly impressed by Luke’s passion in preparing useful materials and zestfully articulating his topics (such as sklearn framework, pandas, EM algorithms, or math, etc), by Zheyu’s professionalism and dedication in helping cohort to fix head-scratching problems and made their life easier, and by Shu’s enthusiasm in designing high-quality materials (sorting, hadoop, spark, etc) to broaden cohort’s skills. Besides, statistics was once a somewhat mysterious subject in my knowledge sphere. For a long time, I wanted to step my feet into its door to systematically cover it but I never managed to. I believe that if people want to explain something very easily without pain, they have to understand it deeply from beneath the bottom. It was Chris who unfolded the foundations of statistics and distilled many useful gists in my head within very short period of timespan. And he truly knew his subject inside out. I gained the gists, built the statistical intuition, and I am now more comfortable than ever before on this subject. 

Thirdly, most importantly to me, the feeling of spending three months with a group of talented people is simply awesome. There is a saying that, “if you are in a room and you are the smartest one, then you are in the wrong room” (https://www.quora.com/Who-can-this-quote-be-attributed-to-If-youre-the-smartest-person-in-the-room-youre-in-the-wrong-room). There were many smart people in that cohort so I was sure I was in the right room. I felt that sharing the joy of enlightenment (when somebody/team achieved high scores in Kaggle leaderboard) or sadness of frustration (when somebody’s code did not work no matter what) with other talented minds was unique and unforgettable experience. Besides, through brainstorming with like-minded, new insights were sparked and new ideas were transferred. Eventually those ideas were distilled into my projects and morphed into my sixth sense of mental muscles. I felt that I was fortunate to be amongst a group of great fellows: there was no bullshitting, no day dreaming, and people were nice and nobody wanted to waste time. They all knew what they were after and worked extremely hard. I am sure I will miss them from time to time.

This course was a masterpiece.  Derek Darves the instructor, quickly brought us to competency with the R programming language.  Then he expanded the course by introducing the packages used for analysis and visualization, progressing through introductory use to somewhat elegant and sophisticated programming challenges. Ultimately Derek brought us to a self-sufficiency level for continuing our R education. The course was a pleasure as Derek is clearly an R expert and aficionado weaving many practical tips and historical insights into the lectures.  His programming experience, statistical insights and extensions of the course materials gave it a graduate level feel, while never ignoring the fundamental skills being taught.  I highly recommend it.

In October, I signed up for the 12 week bootcamp which starts in January.  They recommended I take this course (free of charge) in preparation for the bootcamp to prepare myself in the language (I'm already comfortable in Python).

I'm giving this course 5 stars because, for the format, I think they did a perfect job.  The instructor, Derek Darves, was definitely qualified and a nice guy in general.  They gave the tools to learn the basics of data analysis, manipulation and visualization.  

I attended NYCDSA 5-week course (5 full-time days, one per week) in 4Q16 as part of my preparation to start the same school bootcamp. This was a great introductory start to learn R due to the comprehensive syllabus and dedicated teacher effort. About the syllabus, you will learn Base R syntax and principal data structures identification and manipulation plus a bunch of other packages (e.g. DPLYR) that will make your life easier when treating data sets. The instructor was a Sr. Data Scientist that really gave us two sides: theoretical and hands-on day-to-day professional experience views. This was very helpful. I found that there're lots of courses out there but most of the times taught by recently-graduated teachers that haven't applied a lot of the syllabus to real-life professional situations. This for me was a plus. The only soft point of the course was that I would have liked to go more deeper into web scrapping, yet it's true this course name is 'data analysis and visualization in R' and not 'Web scrapping using R'. One advice only for prospect students: block your agendas during five weeks since you will need a lot of time to review the materials and deliver exercises, which after all it's not  a bad thing as it makes you feel good as you feel you have learnt a lot. Highly recommended.