Data Science and Big Data caught my interest during the last year of my undergraduate degree at UNT.  I took a Natural Language Processing class my jounior year, and after that first class, which was an undergraduate/graduate class, I became fascinated with the algorithms and endless potential. I decided to focus on Natural Language Processing for the remainder of my undergraduate.

I could have went back to school, but my student loan debt was already high; so, not wanting to add to my debt, I had to find other means to learn about Data Science, Big Data, and Machine learning. In this post, I briefly explain how I learned about these subject for free or low cost without having to go back to college. I don’t suggest following the path that I took, but I hope that someone finds this information useful and chooses to learn more about Data Science.

To learn for free, I started by working on side projects that used Natural Language Processing techniques and stock market data, but in 2011, I found out about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). I looked at Coursera first since I wanted to take graduate level courses, and Coursera works with well known universities at bringing their classes online.

I started with Machine Learning, offered by Stanford through Coursera. That class expanded my knowledge about Machine Learning and practical uses of machine learning algorithms, prediction, etc… The course is taught by Andrew Ng at Stanford University and provides a broad introduction to machine learning and its different uses. After taking Machine Learning, I took other classes, such as Introduction to Recommender Systems and Computational Investing, Part 1, but Machine Learning was my favorite and started my MOOCs learning experience.

Udacity offers classes taught by industry experts. Though the classes are not taught by universities, some of the classes are taught by university professors. Udacity offers many Data Science classes that would teach the student practical methods to analyze data and use machine learning. I took a few classes from Udacity, such as Intro to Data Science, Data Analysis with R, and Intro to Hadoop and MapReduce. I also took Mobile Web Development to help with a project that I was working on.

As of this post, I am taking Coursera’s Data Science Specialization from Johns Hopkins University. This set of courses cost money, but not as much as if I were to go back to college.

“This specialization covers the concepts and tools you’ll need throughout the entire data science pipeline, from asking the right kinds of questions to making inferences and publishing results. The Specialization concludes with a Capstone project that allows you to apply the skills you’ve learned throughout the courses.” https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1?utm_medium=listingPage