What is a bootcamp good for?

Pardon my French, but "tu ne sais pas de la merde" until you've been there and done that. This is a familiar catch-22 for an engineering student looking to land their first job or even a working engineer looking to tackle a new kind of project to increase their job satisfaction. School or even self-taught engineers are confronted with crossing the chasm of knowing some tools of the trade and being able to use those tools to build real things. Things that generate the kind of value that people are interested in paying for. Every desirable engineering job is rooted in this kind of activity. So, if you are a newly minted engineering graduate or even a working engineer who is interested in building something new, you need a solution to bridge the gap between what you know and what you can do with what you know. A Bootcamp, when focused on applying knowledge to building valuable things, can be that solution.

When I first graduated from engineering school, I had the benefit of going to a top-tier university. I was well-practiced in the math and science that underpin engineering principles, but I did not really know how to do anything. My good friend also studied engineering and he happened to attend an institute of technology that had a cooperative education built into the degree program. This part of his degree afforded curated opportunities to leave the classroom and work at firms applying engineering principles to solve real problems and create value. When it came time to look for our first “real jobs” out of college, he managed to have an easier time finding opportunities than I did. I actually had better grades, but he had a better experience. He was better prepared to deliver value on day one.

I managed to work my way through this problem by generating my own “pet project” that I was able to build and demonstrate the application of my knowledge. It was the presentation and discussion of this project during my first interviews that eventually opened the doors and landed that initial job. This was a lot harder to do than the co-op experience that my friend had. The curation of the opportunities to get real work experience was a lot easier (and potentially more credible) than what I was able to conjure up on my own. A well-built Bootcamp with a clear path to apply my knowledge and build a real-world system would have saved me some effort and made the path to that first job a lot easier.

Several years into my career, I enjoyed applying my knowledge to computer hardware design, but I also had a strong interest in Digital Signal Processing, especially in the realm of audio (speech) processing. Yet again, I was confronted with needing a focused project-based learning opportunity to immerse myself in a different area of engineering than I was working on in my day job. I ended up going back to graduate school to make this transition, and my thesis was focused on DSP speech recognition. I was lucky that I could carve out that opportunity while I continued to work, but this is not always possible. Here again, a well-built Bootcamp with a clear path to learn some new tools and apply those tools to a new area of engineering is another huge benefit of a Bootcamp. Engineering is never stagnant, and working engineers need to stay fresh not only in their chosen area of expertise but even more so if they are considering applying their skills in a new area.

Most recently, I have returned to my alma mater and developed a “Bootcamp” for building Data Intensive Applications (DIA) at the Goergen Institute of Data Science at the University of Rochester. The course is called Data Science @ Scale, and it introduces students to the use of distributed computing (Apache Spark), data lakes (Delta Lake), and Machine Learning Operations (MLflow) in the context of building a real-world end-to-end data-intensive applications. The students who have taken this course have found the project they developed to be invaluable in their interviews for jobs after graduation. Having a real-world application to discuss is always more effective than tools and technology without the context of how and why they are used.

I am excited to move this benefit to an online version of the course. If this is something that you feel would be helpful to your after-graduation job search or your continued professional development, please consider subscribing to the What Can Data Do? Newsletter for an opportunity to stay in the loop with not only the development of the Data Science @ Scale Bootcamp 2024 but also other exciting updates from Prof. P. Media. Until the next time, stay data curious because, in data, we trust.

Prof. P.