A few years ago the Harvard Business Review article by Thomas Davenport and DJ Patil proclaimed "Data Scientist: the sexiest job of the 21st Century" and I agree with the statement and that is way I am making my career in this field. The second reason I am in this field because I am enjoying it a lot. 

My name is Dev Ranjan and I am from New Delhi, India. In my family, there are some people who are working in Information Technology (IT) field and due to this I was a little bit familiar about this field and I decided to pursue my carrier in this industry. So, I started to learn programming and took admission in SIkkim Manipal University (Distance Learning) for Bachelor of Computer Applications (BCA) course. The first language I used to start learning was C# (.NET platform) but I was not liking it. Then I moved to Android app development using JAVA. While I was learning it, my cousin suggested me to start learning Python due to it's versatility. I started to learn Python and finally decided to stick with it.

While learning Python, I came across the buzz words "Data Science" and "Artificial Intelligence".  I started to research about these terms and found that these are complex things and thought I might not be able to fit in these. In the mean while I learned about "Data Analytics" term and checked some free tutorials on YouTube on this topic. The best thing that attracted my to this was 'Data Visualization'.

So I checked for some courses on Google and bingo... there were plenty of courses available there and I was confused where should I start because all courses were not up to the mark. Also, I was looking for free courses because I was unable to pay a single penny at that time. 

After giving some hours in searching and reviewing the courses, I found 'Coursera' could be the best place to start. Why? because courses over there are by premium institutes from all over the world and topics are taught by renowned professors. Because Coursera charges for certificates, I just audited the courses and learnt various things related to Data Analytics/Science field.

Then I came across with https://cognitiveclass.ai/  by IBM. Some of the courses from this platform are also available on  https://www.coursera.org/  in the same form (ditto) including projects (cognitiveclass has no projects). Here, I learned basics of Data Science and completed 'Data Science Foundations - Level 2 (V2)' course.   

This course was really helpful for me in terms of understanding basics of Data Science.

Also, I had found another course from WorldQuant University, New Orleans, LA, USA. This course was "Applied Data Science Module, Unit I: Scientific Computing and Python for Data Science". This was a free of cost certificate program which I completed in December 2019. 

Here, I polished my Python skills and learned about NumPy, Pandas, DataFrame, Series, data ingestion and transformation with pandas, Data aggregation in pandas, SQL and Object-Relational Mapping and, Data munging.

There were recorded video lectures including online Jupyter environment for executing code online without installing and setting up environment on local machine. There were also live streaming Office Hour session for doubt clearing. It helped me a lot to understand Data Science. At present, I am in the "Unit II: Machine Learning and Statistical Analysis" and learning various things related to Machine Learning.         

Another course I completed was "Elements of AI", a free, beautiful and engaging Artificial Intelligence course with a certificate offered by "University of Helsinki, Finland". I have learned general and basic stuffs in AI. 

  At present I am learning and polishing my Data Analytics skills on DataCamp. DataCamp is not free (except first chapter of each course), it gives you trial access for one month and you can get 2 months trial access if you have "Visual Studio Dev Essentials" account and can have 3 months trial access if you have a "GitHub Student Developer Pack".  If you would like, I will write another post about how you can get 'GitHub Student Developer Pack' if you are a student. 

     If we are talking about Data Science and not familiar about Kaggle, then there is something missing. Kaggle is a Data Science playground, a platform where you can learn, participate and even earn big prizes like 1 Million Dollars for projects like 'Deepfake Detection Challenge'. I am not that pro who can participate these kind of challenges right now ( may be in future : ) ), but I had played with Titanic Data set for data analysis and visualization ( I haven't applied machine learning on this data set yet but planning to do so once complete the WorldQuant's Unit II course). 

My Data Analysis/Visualization work of Titanic Data Set.

So, what should you do if you want to learn Data Science/ AI / Machine Learning?

The answer is Just dive in and start to learn and engage yourself around these topics. Just choose right courses, because there are plenty courses those are not well designed and not well explained.

Can I learn DS/AI/ML/DL for free?

Yes, there are plenty of well designed free courses. If you want, please let me know in comment section and I will make another post for this .

Till next, bye and keep learning.