It has been one awesome month under the She Code Africa Mentorship Program. I have been part of the Data Science Cohort 3 Mentees that started on the 1st of October 2020. After this one month, I would say learning has been rigorously beautiful! Mad o ! 😁

When I first saw the learning path, I was a bit frightened but impressed. Like, if I would be able to do all these, it would be super amazing! The introductory meeting I had to the program was really insightful. Being someone that wanted to switch into Data Science from Teaching, my mentor shared a lot of things, from the professions that collaborate with Data Scientists to the expectations of Data Scientists in different Organizations, to the real roles and skills every Data Scientist must have. I got to understand what it would take to succeed in this chosen profession.

I was given my first project on the first week to create a password generating program and a random number guessing game. These two programs are quite popular but they cover several areas that would stretch your “function skills”, “list skills”, use of python libraries, and other useful areas to coding in python for data science. When I encountered some challenges doing this, I went back to studying more of python. I tried to make sure that I was good with the use of Functions, Lists, Loops and libraries. This lead to my first article under the mentorship program, Beginner Tips for Learning Python (https://link.medium.com/erXkKdP8Bab).

So, Technical Writing is a “thing” with the mentorship program and I can understand why. You can only write on what you know about, so most times you make the effort of “Knowing”; of learning. Speaking is also considered important as well. The thing is, we are groomed to express confidence but this confidence stemming from knowledge of “The Skill”. My mentor made us speak during online meetings. She would ask us to explain given projects and ask questions that make a lot of sense. Then as usual, she would say “Good stuff!” 😁. She had a way of encouraging us.

During the second week, we learned Basic Mathematics for Data Science. We had great resources to understand Statistics and Probability. Then I published Introduction to Understanding Probability for Data Science (https://links.medium.com/WmFX5E89Gab ).

The third week was for libraries. Although this particular week was a difficult one for everyone in the country because of the EndSars protest, my mentor found a way to still get us together to learn; Numpy, Pandas, SciKit Learn, Matplotlib and other libraries. Of course, we were to study more as these libraries and how they are used are pretty wide.

The third week flowed into the fourth week where we started Data Wrangling. Wow, real business! I was quite excited because there were new terms that I learned about. There were alot of things to learn… a lot I must say again! We were given a datasets of about 900, 000 rows to wrangle. I got guided on how to use Kaggle to handle such large datasets. GPU free time, and all that (“still trying to figure that out completely but then, I’m on the train already ;)). Yes I wrote again for the third week into the fourth; Visualization using Matplotlib (https://link.medium.com/fHQuRVl3Yab ).

Aside all the structured learning, I was also introduced to several platforms for Data Scientists and Developers; Stack Overflow, and Hash node. It’s been a fruitful first month for me. Meeting deadlines , stretching myself with projects , Technical writings, connecting, collaborating and building resumes from the skills I am acquiring, and so on. And sometimes, it feels like I won’t make it, then I do and I am proud of all that I am learning and achieving.

Looking forward to my second month at the mentorship program. Gratitude to my mentor and The She Code Africa Team. Y’all are the best!