I'm biased as a non-technical analyst with an academic history, but I'm concerned that the curriculum doesn't meet the most basic needs.
Quoting the section 'An Academic Shortfall':
"Academic credentials are important but not necessary for high-quality data science. The core aptitudes – curiosity, intellectual agility, statistical fluency, research stamina, scientific rigor, skeptical nature – that distinguish the best data scientists are widely distributed throughout the population."
In my estimation, none of those aptitudes are covered by teaching technical skills like databases, NLP, ML, graphical models, and the other topics this curriculum covers.
The "core aptitudes" generally boil down to asking the correct questions, establishing the correct answers, and correctly defending them. Academia doesn't automatically instill these skills, but it can do a great job of doing so.
Either way, inside or outside the ivory tower, an ace programmer who masters NLP, ML, Hadoop, and everything else could easily still come out without the required core aptitudes, and be thoroughly unprepared to do what data scientists are really expected to do: answer questions.
Quoting the section 'An Academic Shortfall': "Academic credentials are important but not necessary for high-quality data science. The core aptitudes – curiosity, intellectual agility, statistical fluency, research stamina, scientific rigor, skeptical nature – that distinguish the best data scientists are widely distributed throughout the population."
In my estimation, none of those aptitudes are covered by teaching technical skills like databases, NLP, ML, graphical models, and the other topics this curriculum covers.
The "core aptitudes" generally boil down to asking the correct questions, establishing the correct answers, and correctly defending them. Academia doesn't automatically instill these skills, but it can do a great job of doing so.
Either way, inside or outside the ivory tower, an ace programmer who masters NLP, ML, Hadoop, and everything else could easily still come out without the required core aptitudes, and be thoroughly unprepared to do what data scientists are really expected to do: answer questions.