University vs Bootcamp

As I mentioned last month, my focus until June 2023 is going to primarily be learn as much about data science and the relevant software as possible. This means that for the time being, my blog posts are likely going to be linked to what I’m learning (and the reason I’m posting the October blog post on November 2022 – still faster than Valve, ha!).

In particular, with the second ongoing month of learning at the Nashville Software School (Data Science bootcamp) I thought it would be interesting to compare my different experiences within the “classical” learning (i.e., school), and a bootcamp.

And to be clear, I’m not talking about private schools or for-profit bootcamps – not a fan of them (although I’m sure some have the best intentions).

Brief Background

I won’t go over all of the history of the educational system. That said, I think it is important to point out that getting (higher) education always has been and still is a privilege. Starting from the Greek philosophers, they could only afford to dedicate their life to thinking because they were well off. They had the means to survive and therefore they were able to focus on using their brain. Not much has changed; people who’re able to pursue higher education need to have a certain standard of living. While it is theoretically possible to both work and go to school, it is in my view a waste of brainpower. In order to get the most out of education, you need to have as much time and energy at your disposition as possible.

I was privileged and lucky enough that I didn’t have to work (thanks in part to a stipend/scholarship I received) and so I was able to entirely focus on studying at the university. I’ve done it the very much “intended” way. From elementary school, to the classical gymnasium (equivalent to middle/high school) and then university with no breaks in between. I began to realize that because of my love for fiction, if I ended up studying mathematics I’d probably get so far removed from the real world I’d start living in n-dimensional spaces entirely (where n is an arbitrarily large number). I needed more of a tether to the “real” world and so physics was it for me. I was in school for little less than 19 years.

The bootcamps on the other hand are a much more modern approach that started with the military. The base idea being of training people in a short timeframe, but it being very intensive. Over the years this idea expanded from exercise into getting people additional education – typically for a career transition of some kind. So from it’s onset it’s geared more towards older people, and it’s more so specifically aimed at kickstarting someone’s career (or at least they should be – there are of course scams disguised as bootcamps). So from their inception already quite different from what described above.

I talked about the Data Science bootcamp (9 months total) last month as well; I’ve always enjoyed working with data and on top of that, this seemed to be like a great chance to explore more about neural networks and machine learning – so I knew exactly what I was getting myself into!

Learning Process

Thorough the whole classical education process the idea is to re-learn things at a deeper level and build on top of that knowledge in more advanced schools. In my experience however, there is a huge disconnect between the gymnasium and university. My go to example is mathematics – our teacher at the gymnasium, Danica, was absolutely phenomenal and prepared me well for any calculations that I’d encounter in physics, no doubt about it.

And yet, nothing in our gymnasium prepared me to truly understand what mathematics is at a university level. All the calculations? Gone. Numbers are replaced with theory and letters. Postulates, proofs and abstract concepts. You think integrals are bad? Ha, wait till you hear about Kurzweil-Henstock integration for bizarre functions only mathematicians dream of!

Whenever younger people ask me about university I would always tell them that my biggest surprise was just how different mathematics is. In fact, my brother, who ended up studying math often jokes that it is not a job of mathematician to deal with numbers – it is instead using variables only.

This isn’t necessarily an issue; I’m just saying I (and I think many others) didn’t expect what we got. Basically, there is a disconnect between learning and understanding the fundamentals and later on truly delving into the nitty gritty details.

The bootcamp is, by design, much more goal oriented. While we do get some great theoretical background thanks to our awesome instructor Michael, any new concepts are quickly applied to practice. Learning about web scraping? Bam, here’s a website, good luck and have fun! It’s a lot of hands on experience, with us being able to ask for help either our instructor Michael or the two TAs, Rohit and Neda. They all clearly understand the topics and provide as much help and additional information as one would want.

In other words, knowledge is very much distilled and focussed, with the option to delve deeper if desired. We are consistently given additional resources to check out topics if interested. To be fair, I don’t have time to explore them in depth, but definitely saving them for future reference!

Practical Application

I’m going to quote one of my mentors at the time, Fabio: “Doing research is hard, but it is still better than working.” Here’s the thing: people who go into research do so because they are curious. They want to push the boundaries of science and keep asking questions about the world that we live in.

That ideal may or may not coincide with the very short-term oriented companies and business, where immediate gains and growth trump over long-term sustainability. For example, even though the world wide web was developed at CERN (as part of a worldwide collaboration), companies that profit of it most, don’t want to reinvest – because it typically takes several decades for research in particle physics to be commercially viable. That is the struggle of academic research: provide the world with awesome stuff, with very limited resources, only for the credit to be taken away by someone who monetizes it.

On a personal level, once you’re out of the academic bubble, you lose access to research journals, computational clusters and data. Even if I wanted to continue researching particle physics on my own, I couldn’t have done so. Same is true for other branches of physics – nowadays they require massive resources that a single individual typically doesn’t have. I could have continued to study the theoretical aspects of it, but not the data analysis and simulations which is what I was interested in the first place.

Conversely, everything that we’ve learned so far in Data Science, we’ve done on our own laptops (or computers). Even if I were do decide to not pursue a career in data science for whatever reason, I can continue honing my skills with python (and later R, SQL, etc…). I can find stuff on the web that looks interesting and apply what I’ve learned. Very tangible ideas and curiosities that I legitimately have the tools to implement.

Also, contrary to academia, companies have a bigger vested interest in supporting (or being in touch) with boot camps, because they are specifically designed to give people skills that are currently sought for and needed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that bootcamps have no staying power, or, that skills needed will change quickly or frequently. It is just a fundamentally different approach (goal oriented, versus just open curiosity if you will), that fits the business models better.

Grading

Growing up lots of people thought that I enjoyed taking tests simply because I received good grades. There is this assumption that if you do well, you don’t need to stress about it. Yeah, I call bullshit. I always despised tests. Again and again, written and oral examinations to consistently “prove” the knowledge obtained and retained. I constantly felt judged and on edge to perform and this all culminated with the PhD entry exams. The stress and uncertainty if I’ll be accepted in the program represented the worst time of my life.

And what are all those grades good for? Like my professor Marcello told us in the very first year of physics, nobody cares about the grades anymore once you finish your studies. It is purely an antiquated way of measuring supposed intellect.

I also feel like the whole idea of individualized grading is contrary to then having to work in teams (both in research and other jobs). Like, how are we expected to excel individually, fight for future research contracts, but then suddenly work with others?

Instead with the bootcamp, our progress gets evaluated based on the projects and presentations and it feels way more a challenge against yourself more so than classmates. I love that. It’s more about figuring out how to best help teach people effectively and not punish anyone based on some random metric invented to fit the students under a Gaussian Distribution. 

Working in teams and meeting classmates is also an integral part of the program, which I’m enjoying a lot.

In Summary…

Truth is, there is no shortcut to tackle this topic. I think there is a much deeper conversation that people should have about education in general. I feel like it would be beneficial to design and implement bootcamps in between high school and university, along with plenty of time off to just figure out what teenagers want to do in life – giving people a much needed practical feel of where their field can lead them to.

And conversely, I think we need bootcamps later on in life that can get people into research too (instead of just work)! Why does it have to take years and years of formal theoretical education which can be grueling and at times not even relevant to where someone eventually ends up?

Our whole separation between work and education needs to have more fluidity to it and in my view, that would end up benefitting everyone.