Following the launch of the Data/AI Fast Track programme in January, graduates started their intensive 4-week bootcamp learning with our University partner, The University of South Wales.
The bootcamp learning focused on equipping grads with the fundamentals of data analytics and computing to ensure could apply their learning directly within their employer placements from the very start of the programme.
The content for bootcamp was specifically designed by the course team at USW to reflect the learning objectives set by the employers and to reflect the most recent advances in Data Science and AI.
Course Leader Rebecca Peters said, “As a course team we were impressed by the quality of questions asked and work produced by the grads. The bootcamp is incredibly intense, it’s often referred to as the make or break for the programme. Whilst we don’t want to break any of our grads, they were certainly pushed and challenged. The graduates exceeded expectations; I would like to applaud them for all their hard work during the bootcamp.”
During the final week of the bootcamp the graduates completed a Hackathon. This is always a fantastic way to expose the graduates to the creativity and collaboration involved in working on a real-world data science problem.
The graduates worked in teams to apply the learning they’d acquired throughout the bootcamp to tackle the challenge; what’s going on in the UK housing market?
This involved exploring the current state of play in the UK housing market and evaluating the impact of this in the wider context of the current pandemic.
Rebecca said, “I was impressed by the enthusiasm and problem-solving approach demonstrated by each of the grads. They had to delegate roles within their teams, propose hypotheses and test for analysis, summarise results and present their findings. The grads all made valuable individual contributions and it was great to see such a high level of engagement.”
Having completed the bootcamps, our Data/AI graduates are now all undertaking their full-time placement with an employer from our consortium. As part of their PgDip studies they have also moved on to study machine learning where they will build upon many of the statistical techniques previously seen, such as multivariate analysis.
We look forward to seeing all the grads progress over the second half of their programme journey.