Great Learning
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Intensive professional AI course
I attended Great Learning's "Applied Data Science Program: Leveraging AI for Effective Decision-Making." Such courses weren't offered back in my college days and in today's fast paced world the state of the art of AI is rapidly changing. I desired to upskill my knowledge and obtain certification as well as a public portfolio of advanced projects to demonstrate my capabilities. The curriculum is up to the moment, comprehensive and allows for some personal focus for interest and depth. It also begins with optional pre-courses to ensure all students are prepared with pre-requisites. For major projects GL offers two tracks, either low code, management level programs or full code-oriented deliverables. You can also focus on an area of interest, although the total options are limited in each area. Each course is about a week with live lectures on theory in each machine learning arena from world-class MIT professors. The most valuable portion was the weekly mentorship with industry professionals. They not only provided guidance on the homework but were a wealth of practical knowledge and career-relevant tips. It was particularly useful to watch an AI professional respond to a question in real-time by accessing the resources they use themselves. I frequently used the recorded lectures and professional sessions in addition to complete attendance of all live sessions. This is a time intensive set of courses which I estimate at 20+ hours per week for complete understanding of the materials. I found it easiest to follow each course linearly, downloading the resources locally for cross-reference. The quizzes for each week were a bit light, and easily aced from the provided materials, but the projects were quite challenging and really developed your skills. In addition to the core materials, there was a generous quantity of additional courses and information with in-depth examples. Timing for courses was difficult for west coast US, with early classes and mentorships commonly starting between 5:30am to 6:30am M/W/F/Sat/Sun, and 1a Tuesday morning due dates. Support was available, friendly and very flexible in my case. I worked with my PM to change cohorts to fit with my work schedule and to allow for planned travel. They were particularly flexible when I had extended out time for illness during the Capstone project period. I had expected to really hone my machine learning capabilities but left with a real appreciation and understanding for neural network deep learning. I now feel comfortable stretching my professional interests into areas that I hadn't considered before such as medical research, natural language processing and computer vision. I highly recommend this program to those desiring a broad relevant skillset in AI problem solving, at a value price point, accomplishable in just a few intense months.