Yanina K.

For a long time I felt that I need a career change but I wasn't sure where to go. I tries various courses on Coursera and Udemy but without much success. In the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, I saw a Yandex Practicum ad on Facebook and decided to try the Data Analyst program. In the beginning, I wasn't even sure that I will be able to finish it because the whole topic was pretty new to me. But as I was doing it, I got more and more interested and involved in the program. The main program starts with a lesson about mindset and it really helped me improve my attitude. The course is structured in just the right way to involve students and keep it interesting. There are tons of practice tasks from the very beginning with increasing difficulty. The theoretical parts are clearly written and followed by exercises and real life projects. All exercises and projects pretty challenging so you can feel the growing confidence after completing it. All projects are get checked by an industry professionals. They provide really valuable feedback. Sometime you may need to correct and resubmit the project several times until it is done correctly and accepted by reviewer. During the program, I completed 12 projects and one additional project, so the portfolio is pretty impressing. Another great part of the program are biweekly webinars. During the webinar, students could see the how the data analyst works on different real life problems and real time coding sessions. The webinars give more live interactions to the program.
The program teaches all technical and soft skills needed to junior data analyst:
- Python programming language with libraries like Pandas, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Plotly, etc.
- Jupiter Notebook
- SQL queries and data processing
- Data preprocessing with Python
- Exploratory and statistical data analysis
- Business analytics and A/B test
- Data visualization (graphs and dashboards) with Python libraries and Tableau
- Automation and machine learning basics
As a student, I feel constant support from the Practicum team: community managers, mentor, technical support and from fellow students. You can ask any question in the chat and get needed help pretty fast. Sometimes there could be some time lag because the team can be located in the other part of the world but technical support helps really fast anyway.
I also need to mention the career support program where student can get various help with resume writing, portfolio preparation, attend webinars with technical recruiters and career couches and much more.
To make the program even more appealing, I would make some suggests:
* I would add kind of "tutor-on-duty" to answer the questions of the students from the different time zones. Sometimes, I got stuck in some tasks and could not move forward. I had to wait the help from my tutor till the next day because of the time difference. It could be pretty annoying for people with the packed schedules.
* It would be very useful to have both way communication with the reviewer.
* Also, after completion of the projects, it would be very interesting to see other students' projects or best projects from the previous cohorts.
Thank you Yandex Practicum Team for the great program, for the opportunity to be part of the great community, and opportunity to grow as a professional.