Learning in Times of Corona — A Review

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The Background

Two months ago I wrote about my plan on how I am going to utilize this Coronavirus pandemic lock-down. The gist is I wanted to do a 90-day MOOC’athlon learning challenge inspired by Rassul-Ishame Kalfane and Scott H. Young. Here is the list of things I wanted to accomplish (You can read the entire plan in detail here.):

1. Read and understand Python Language Reference, Python Library Reference, Python tutorial, Functional Programming Style, all from the official docs.
2. SQL Intro and familiarity with basic command at https://sqlbolt.com/
3. Learn NumPy and its internals. Learn SciPy Ecosystem
4. Work through Python for Data Analysis by Wes McKinney
5. Work through Think Stats and Think Bayes by Allen Downey
6. Learn Probability (Don’t know yet from where)
7. Master Machine Learning Theory from An Introduction to Statistical Learning
8. Scrap data from internet and clean/wrangle it
9. A complete reading of one of the books from down here

Source: Jordan, Financial Times and Eric

Questions

For these two months hospitals were open 24x7 and vegetable/grocery shops were open for 2 hours a day. We are still in Unlock-1 phase. Lock-down in India started in March and it took the entire country a month to understand how serious this pandemic is. I thought the world is so big and only World War 3 can stop the world from functioning. No, we don’t need weapons, all it took was a tiny virus that we can’t even see and it utilized no nuclear power, it is using us, our bodies, to do what it is supposed to do. Sometimes I think who taught this Coronavirus to do what it is doing, who taught this virus how to get inside a human cell and instruct it to replicate himself and our cells listen to it too. Who taught our immune system to develop resistance against it or sometimes succumb to it? Who taught it to interfere with someone’s breathing? A very strange question I know. It just made me realize how unpredictable life is. Today we are here and the next day we might not even exist. We just take it for granted because life was given free. We put more effort into accumulating stuff while ignoring our bodies at the same time. We forget relationships are more valuable than our egos. Ego makes us buy luxurious stuff while ignoring the fact that people in our lives are the ones that heal us and sometime we might heal them too. We need to focus more on what can’t be bought or purchased and that is what I found out in my MOOC’athlon 90-day learning challenge.

The point of this post is to get feedback by asking questions:

• Did I finish what I set onto accomplish
• Was it efficient
• Which things were excellent and why
• Did I do something worse and why
• Could I have done better
• How can I do better if I start today, right now

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Technical Review

:COMPLETED:
1. Python official docs:
— Python Language Reference
— Library Reference
— Python Tutorial
— Functional Programming Style

2. Python for Data Analysis by Wes McKinney

3. SQL Intro at https://sqlbolt.com/

4. NumPy Intro

5. Think Stats by Allen Downey

:DROPPED:
1. SciPy Ecosystem — The reason for this is: Learning the entire ecosystem, all at once, makes it more like studying an academic subject. I better learn the tools separately as I need them along the way.

2. Probability and Statistics: To p or not to p? (coursera). The reason is: Course is good and very beginner-friendly and just too beginner-friendly for my taste. So I dropped it off even though I was completed two weeks of the course. That is a lot to drop but one has to look ahead, not what one has left behind.

:NOT DONE:
1. Think Bayes by Allen Downey

2. Master ML theory from An Introduction to Statistical Learning

3. The 3 books I posted above.

:EXTRAS:

1. 10 MOOCs on learning and personal-development from Udemy. (I enrolled for 29 in total, dropped 19 of them because they didn’t fit with MOOC’athlon challenge)
2. A week-long machine learning from blogposts by Jason Brownlee. It was an awesome week where I learned hell lot of things about machine learning.
3. Mindshift MOOC from Coursera
4. 6 different MOOCs from Data Camp when they gave them away for free for a week in Corona lockdown.
5. An excellent book by Hans Rosling: Factfulness

So almost 8 out of 11 things are completed and I completed a similar amount of MOOCs not on the list. It is a lot for me to accomplish because I have failed at 100% of the goals I have ever committed to. Most of the time I could not achieve what I set to and the other times it was achieved so late (by years) that the goal didn’t matter anymore. In 60 out of 90 days of this MOOC’athlon learning challenge, I have an 80% success rate, this should be impossible. Something I am thankful to this Universe during midlife-crisis.

I still feel I could have done better. Moreover, learning data science feels like a secondary thing. The primary reason for the joy I am feeling is because of non-technical stuff. Things I found about my behavior, the way I approach life and its problems, limitations of my thinking. I feel I did everything at half of the potential I am capable of.

The Real Stuff

Here are three things that I learned in the last 60 days and you can use them to become more, to do the impossible stuff in your life:

Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay

1. Push your comfort zone. For data science, there will be certain topics, certain subjects that make you uncomfortable. Topics and subjects so tough that they take away your power of focus and concentration. Actively seek to learn them, don’t be passive. In a few days or weeks, you will feel fine with them. Don’t underestimate the strength of this step. This might be exactly what you need before it becomes clear to you what you are going to do next.
2. Face your fears. Whatever it is that scares you about data science or your career, don’t run away from it. It might be the thing you need to learn to go to the next step. Take it head-on, watch YouTube videos, read books, blog-posts, articles from the ones who have mastered the subject. Fear is slavery. Fear is a shackle that binds you to lies. Fear is a deception. Free yourself from fear by doing exactly what you have fear of. Breaking through this obstacle will alter the way you think about problems in your life. You will learn problems in life are not inherently scary. The only thing a problem carries is inherent-unfamiliarity and it is your job to get familiar with it and you do that by facing it, by attacking it from different angles, by finding a solution. This is the reason you are alive. Trust me, you will know how it feels.
3. Seek imperfection. Trying to do everything perfectly is a recipe for disaster. Perfection and Idealism are mirror-images of each other. I compare perfection with utopia, a land of everlasting amounts of honey, and flowing with rivers of milk. No one ever gets hungry, everyone gets to wear clothes and unrestricted access to high-quality food, clean water, and comfortable shelter. We have people with different attitudes, with different ideas, selfish and selfless, good and bad, virtuous and evil. Real-life is dirty, messy, and it is complex. Utopia fits better in a fictional novel, not in real-life. You will never be perfect. You need to embrace your imperfections. When I shifted my focus from being perfect and ideal to: “Let’s learn this topic imperfectly. Let’s do more of it and correct some imperfections in every iteration. Also, make a list of posts/articles/topics to read to improve in next iteration”, I got over most of the obstacles hindering my learning.

Learning about yourself doesn’t have to take years. You can learn something extremely and specifically valuable to you by facing the problems that have troubled you the most. Now I will push myself more on these three fronts from today. And here are the goals for the rest of the 30 days of this challenge:

1. Think Bayes by Allen Downey
2. Step-4 of machine learning mastery by Jason Brownlee.
3. Predictive Analytics book by Eric Segal (Predictive Analytics World)
4. Linear Regression & Classification, first three chapters from An Introduction to Statistical Learning.
5. Master matplotlib from official tutorials and examples

I had to take 2 weeks break because of the burnout. I worked crazy long hours with insane amounts of focus. You need to give rest to your mind and body. A MOOC’athlon challenge is not about tasks-lists. It is about why you want to do it. If you have done some learning challenge, if you have learned something valuable by facing your problems and things that scare you, please do share in comments. May the Force be with you.