Blog

Tomorrow is Demo Day for Cohort 19 at NSS. Demo Day is a big deal here - it marks the graduation of another cohort of students and it marks the formal kick-off of most grads’ job searches. It also gives us a chance to showcase to the community our newest grads, what they’ve learned, and what they can do with those skills. However, today’s Demo Day was not the way we originally released our grads into the wild. It’s something that evolved out of experience and trying other things. In that sense it’s like so much of what we do - it’s driven by experience, by feedback, and by trial and error. In other words, it’s driven by learning. Which seems somehow appropriate, right? Read More

When we were talking to working data scientists and data engineers here in Nashville about designing a data science program there were several things that people consistently identified as being important if we were going to familiarize students with what it is like to work in a real data analytics/data science job. One of the things we heard was that Data Science in the real world is messy because the real world is messy. Data in the real world is never clean and/or complete and/or consistent or any of the other things it needs to be for our modeling techniques or predictive techniques to work. Based on the input we received, we have designed into our curriculum and projects the idea that we need to teach the entire data science process, not just the fun/cool machine learning and statistical modeling pieces of the process. Read More

I still remember like it was yesterday. Four years plus ago one of our recent grads came up to me at a local tech event and said, “Thank you for NSS - you’ve changed my life”. My first reaction was shock that someone had credited me and the school I had founded with something as profound as changing their life. The second reaction was some combination of happiness for them - that they had found something in terms of career and satisfaction from the investment they had made in learning - and some mix of pride and ego that I and my little experiment in vocational education had changed someone’s life. And quickly that second part of the reaction made me uncomfortable. Read More