MSCS/MSDS on performance based admissions programs

[mcmctalk]

Mcmctalk, would you be willing to elaborate on your experience with the statistics.com courses. Our son is considering that degree at TESU, and it would be very helpful to know how those courses are.

Were they too difficult? Too easy? Was the material not relevant? Or not explained very well? Was it too short (4 weeks) to master the material?

Or what else did you think about it?

We would much appreciate it!

Sure.  I took the courses about 5ish years ago, so some things may have changed (I'd be surprised given the age of the video I was provided).  I took the first 2 sets of the intro courses, the focus were on basics of statistics, topics like bootstrap, correlation, confidence interval, basic inference etc were covered.  As a technical person that worked with data for the past decade, the concept itself were not particularly difficult for me and I was excited to learn the classical vocabulary and academic methodologies to these statistical tools I utilize in my daily work.  

My experience of it was that the course materials didn't feel professional or academic, it felt like someone wrote it without an editor with academic background.  At times it was confusing what the material was trying to convey, and at times the topic goes on tangent like a blog post trying to make a point.  The video quality were poor, like it was recorded a decade ago, with the instructor using physical paper to illustration statistical concept instead of on-screen visualization.  For what you pay, which is fairly expensive considering it's like 800-1000 per course, I felt like I got more value out of watching khan academy or something similar, which is what I ended up doing. Ultimately you still have to sift through all the material, participate in exercises.  I don't believe there was an option to merely test out.  

To be fair, the courses did cover the materials outlined in the syllabus, and it's not like these basic statistics concepts need updating like programming languages or tech stacks. Ultimately for me the courses were not particularly engaging and the thought of another 1-2 yrs worth of similar quality instructions just wasn't something I was willing to put time in to optimize for.  

If your son is truly interested in data science as a field and is young with time to commit to classical education of the core material, I think a CC route to learn these concepts will be a better investment.  I work for one of the Fortune 500 tech companies in the bay and the almost all the DS I work with either have masters or PhD, with significant amount of them with PhD.  It doesn't mean you have to have these higher level degrees to enter but the technical interview will likely focus on fairly difficult data science questions and I don't get the impression Statistics.com would appropriately prepare you for something like that.  Data Analyst may be a potential entry level path but even then it's fairly competitive.  SWE have had a lot more autodidacts historically so recruiters seems more accepting of candidates from no-degree or degrees from less prestigious institutions and use technical reviews to weed people out but that's a much broader field and would make sense for there to be more non-degree holders in high positions. 

Anyway, hope that's helpful and happy to answer any other questions.