Which Data Science Bootcamp is Best?

In a world in which the usefulness of a four-year college degree is coming more and more into question, the tech bootcamp has emerged as a viable alternative. Bootcamps are a far quicker way to acquire the necessary skills to start a career in any number of IT fields, data science among them. These bootcamps come in a variety of flavors, and, while there aren’t 31 of them, there are enough to warrant an investigation on your part into the available possibilities. Do you wish—or can you afford—to study full-time, or do you require a bootcamp with a part-time schedule? And where do you want to study, in a classroom together with your instructor, or using the internet as your campus and connecting to a class from a location of your own choosing? There are other considerations to bear in mind as well: do you want a bootcamp that comes with extensive career services?, one that guarantees you’ll find a job within a certain period of time?, one that pairs you with a mentor?, one that guarantees you’ll learn the skills mentioned in the brochure?, or one that offers a payment plan that suits your wallet?

That’s a lot to consider before you can make an informed decision as to the bootcamp that will suit you best. The following should help you to sort through what may seem like a hopelessly byzantine set of options.

What are the most important criteria to evaluate in Data Science bootcamps?

When considering a data science bootcamp, you’ll have to look at a number of factors that won’t be of equal importance to you. Indeed, the different ways in which candidates arrange their priorities explain why there are so many different types of bootcamps and certificate programs. (So-called certificate programs derive their name to contrast with college degree programs, which yield diplomas.) You’ll thus have to evaluate your options as to when, where, how, and why you want to study data science.

The when question is whether you want to study full- or part-time. Many bootcamp providers offer their courses in both versions, although, for most people, only one of the alternatives will suit their schedules, and unimaginative reality will make your choice for you. As for where, that’s the decision between a live in-person course and an online one, in which you study from a place you choose and from which you connect to a virtual classroom. How refers to the choice between a live bootcamp and a self-paced one, in which you watch pre-recorded video tutorials and do your learning from those. (In this case, there can be little question that that a live bootcamp is preferable to the canned one, if only for the obvious reason that the self-paced class affords you no possibility of asking the instructor a question when you don’t understand greedy algorithms and need a human to explain them to you in terms you can fathom.) Finally, why represents the choice between what you can term skill-focused and career-focused bootcamps: some exist to teach you certain specific topics, not for your amusement, but because you need to know them, while others are designed to launch you into a career. The skills-focused bootcamp can be useful for people with jobs who want to —or who have been told to—upskill themselves, while the career-focused model is designed more with people who seek to make a full-fledged shift into a data science career.

What are the Top Data Science Bootcamps?

Among the plethora of data science bootcamps available, New York City’s Noble Desktop offers its bootcamp programs both live in Gotham and online anywhere the internet reaches (so you’re out of luck if you’re somehow managing to read this in Turkmenistan.) The school’s two primary bootcamp offerings in data science are both certificate programs: the Data Science Certificate and the Data Analytics Certificate. Both are available in full- or part-time versions, and include 1-to-1 mentoring sessions to prepare you for the job market.

A further online school, General Assembly, offers its own 12-week Data Science Bootcamp. Designed for students bent on switching careers, the curriculum assumes that students possess some knowledge of Python and some advanced mathematical skills. (Some of that material is covered in the self-paced pre-work modules that must be completed prior to the first day of class.) The program concludes with an individual capstone project in which the student analyzes and implements a solution to a real-world data problem. The program is available exclusively online.

One of several major universities that have partnered with adult education specialist edX is Rutgers, based in New Brunswick, New Jersey, but offering its 24-week part-time bootcamp only online. The curriculum begins with intermediate Excel for data science, before proceeding to Python and its libraries, databases, Tableau for data visualization, and, finally, machine learning. Various student support resources are included in the price of tuition, including a dedicated career services team that will prepare you for your job search.

Enrolling in a Data Science Bootcamp Part-Time or Full-Time

Some definitions are in order: in the bootcamp world, a full-time program is just that. It generally meets for eight hours a day (don’t worry, you’ll still get to eat lunch), five days a week, for however many weeks (usually somewhere from six to 12) the program runs. Part-time means anything that isn’t full-time, and can indicate classes that meet for three-hour sessions several evenings a week, for full-day sessions on weekends, or sometimes both. Rather obviously, a part-time program will take many more weeks to complete than a full-time one, with 24 weeks (which is to say half a year) the most oft-encountered figure.

Your choice between a full-time and a part-time bootcamp most likely will be dictated by your circumstances. If you’re working a full-time job or have daytime family commitments, you can’t take on a full-time bootcamp for simple reasons of scheduling. If you’re taking time off from work (or pausing a job search), you’re going to want to get through your bootcamp as quickly as possible. Even a month and a half is a long time to be without income, especially if you’re paying tuition on top of not getting paid. You’ll thus gravitate toward the full-time bootcamp.

There is a group of people who have the luxury of a choice between full- and part-time bootcamps. These are generally people who don’t have full-time commitments, but who have less pressure on them to produce an income stream. If you do have the choice, consider that the full-time bootcamp gives you the more intensive and immersive experience: true to the metaphor for which it’s named, a full-time bootcamp will have you eating, breathing, and sleeping data science for however long it runs. Some people learn very well in such high-pressure circumstances. You’ll also have the advantage of not having time between classes to forget everything you learned. On the other hand, some people don’t thrive in such onerous circumstances and will fare better moving at a slower pace, with shorter sessions in class and more off-time between them. Yes, you can use that off-time to forget what you learned, but some brains absorb information better when it’s not dumped on them in a steady stream of fell swoops. You should be aware of your personal learning style, and, if you have the choice between full- and part-time bootcamps, choose accordingly.

Enrolling in a Data Science Bootcamp In-Person or Online

Since the general public adopted the internet, adult education has gone through an almost complete paradigm shift. Schools that once held their classes on campuses that were more or less conveniently located for their students began to adopt the virtual classroom and to offer their educational wares across the internet. A quarter of a century after the internet became a thing, these virtual classrooms have become the rule rather than the exception. Indeed, finding an in-person class that requires a trip to a brick-and-mortar building to work with a flesh-and-blood live teacher is becoming increasingly difficult except in the very largest markets. Otherwise, live in-person classes have become almost as rare as kyawthuite crystals.

If you can find one near you (a school, not a kyawthuite deposit), a live in-person class is going to be just like most of your educational experience growing up: you’ll be in the same room and inhaling the same air as your instructor, who’ll have a whiteboard, dry-erase marker and possibly an overhead projector as teaching aids. The chief plus of such an arrangement is that it’s familiar: you’ve been learning like that ever since kindergarten, and there’s no adjustment to a new teaching platform involved. You may also feel that you’re more likely to pay attention to the teacher and not zone out if you’re both in the same room. Especially if you have no experience with online learning, you’re likely to find this arrangement attractive.

The live online class, however, has a number of advantages over the live in-person class of soon-to-be yore. The first is that you don’t have to do anything to get to school. There’s no commute time, because you can study from wherever you are (as long as it’s not some place like Eritrea.) You can find your own peaceful place to study, and, while people in adult education classes generally won’t be flying paper airplanes across the classroom, there will still be distractions in an in-person classroom. Unless your dog is really insistent about going walkies during your class time, you won’t have to contend with similar distractions while learning from home. You’ll also have literally all the comforts of home at your disposal: a chair you like, absolute control over the air conditioning, and on-site catering of the highest quality. There may be an adjustment period involved if you’ve never participated in a live online class, but, for most people, the adjustment is quickly made.

Do You Want to Start a New Career using Your Data Science Training?

There are multiple reasons for wanting to study data science. Although they are all workplace-related (a bootcamp is an awfully taxing and expensive way to satisfy mere curiosity), some people turn to bootcamps to advance a career that they’re already having, while some people elect to attend a bootcamp because they want to change careers entirely. The former are likely more concerned with the skills their bootcamp will be teaching, while the latter group will want to be sure that their bootcamp is in step with their new career goals, and, if possible, provide some degree of career services to help them in the job search they’ll have to tackle come graduation day.

Career services come in varying shapes and sizes. Few are the bootcamps that ignore them entirely, but, at the other end of the spectrum, some bootcamps come with a career services staff that will seek out available roles for which you can apply. Sometimes, you’ll be assigned your own career services specialist whose job is getting you a job, and some bootcamps have group sessions in which approaches to the job market are examined on a weekly basis. You may also encounter bootcamp providers who guarantee employment within six months of your completing your program (but beware of the fine print.) The downside to these career services programs is that they’re time-consuming and add considerably to the price of your bootcamp.

What is perhaps more unequivocally helpful is career services that see to it that you’re ready for the job market. That involves such things as resume polishing, help with cover letters, mock interviews, and curating the selection of in-class projects that will serve as your portfolio. Some providers (such as Noble Desktop) offer these services as part of a mentorship program that gives you a chance to work 1-to-1 with an experienced data scientist, who, in addition to the assistance with your job-search materials, can also help you out with technical matters as well as providing emotional support as you transition from bootcamp to job search. 

Which Data Science Bootcamp is Best For Me?

There’s a further criterion not mentioned in the foregoing: the price. There are enormous variations in the price of data science bootcamps, which can run anywhere from around $5,000 to around $25,000. Remember, however, that all that glitters is not gold, nor is everything priced as though it were made of gold actually made of that precious metal. You may not have unlimited funds at your disposal, so the bootcamp you choose may well have to be, first and foremost, within your price range. Certainly, there are installment plans, and sometimes even deferred payment plans in which you don’t have to pay anything until you’re employed, but, great as that may sound, you may come to regret having to pay a chunk of your entry-level salary every month to defray your delayed tuition. You should be aware that bootcamps aren’t available for government student loan funding such as Sallie Mae, and that third-party lenders for bootcamps operate under different rules than the government does.

Once past those far from insignificant pecuniary details, choosing the right bootcamp depends on how all the above factors stack up for you personally. If you’re working full-time or if there are other considerations that put substantial claims on your time, you’re probably going to be in the market for a part-time bootcamp. It’s going to call for some patience on your part to get to the finish line, but it’s better than biting off more than you can chew when your time is already committed elsewhere. If the field is clear for a full-time bootcamp, you should still be sure that you want to put in the kind of work a full-time bootcamp involves. There is no right or wrong a priori answer here: you need to understand how you learn, and should decide accordingly.

When it comes to choosing between a live online and a live in-person class, that choice is probably going to be made for you unless you live in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. The bootcamp paradigm has shifted online, if only for the reason that it opens the field of potential students to almost the entire world. As you will very likely be choosing an online class, there is another important factor to consider: the time zone from which your course originates. There are online bootcamps that originate from every time zone in the United States; that gives you a lot of freedom to select just the right schedule.

There’s another factor that will influence your final decision. You’re going to have to choose whether you want a bootcamp geared for beginners who are seeking to change careers (the full-scale bootcamp or certificate program) or whether you just need a class or two to fill in some gaps in your knowledge (e.g., you know Python, but you don’t know how to use it for machine learning.)

There are cases, however, in which a bootcamp won’t suit your needs and priorities. This will most likely be created by your time commitments outside of the class you’re considering. Fear not: that doesn’t send you to the showers before you’ve even gotten a chance to stand in the batting box. It just means that you’ll have to find some alternative to a class that requires your presence for set hours several times a week. The best alternative to a live online bootcamp in this case is going to be an on-demand course in which you sit in your comfortable chair and watch a series of curated video tutorials on the subject of data science. The curricula of these courses can cover the same material as a live bootcamp, with the salient difference that you won’t be able to ask your instructor a question when you don’t understand something. That is, admittedly, a flaw, but you can still learn a great deal from an on-demand data science course, and be equipped to make a career pivot when you’re done.