"The good thing about the part-time remote Bootcamp is that you have a few days between sessions and you can organize your learning journey “as you want”. But the difficult thing about the part-time remote Bootcamp is that in parallel, you have a job! It takes resilience to stay motivated and work almost 20 hours a week in addition to a normal job… But it is not impossible and totally worth the extra work :)"
Hi François, can you please introduce yourself?
Hey there :) My name is François, I'm from France and I recently graduated from a Business school. Parallel to doing Le Wagon's Data Science part-time Bootcamp in the remote format, I work as a Sales for a proptech company specialized in real estate data.
A few weeks after I started my job, I really fell in love with the product and the technical side of things. It was a world I didn’t really know and then I had a revelation: product management was the perfect job for me.
Even though I have always been “the geek in my group of friends” and I have always been good at computers, I had no real and concrete technical knowledge. I realized I needed more to become a (good) product manager: I needed to be super good at computers.
Did you already have any coding knowledge before joining the Bootcamp?
In order to become “super good at computers”, I decided to follow online courses. And there began a super frustrating period: there are SO many things to learn, in SO many different domains, with SO many possibilities… I followed a lot of courses on Udemy (very cool to start my coding journey with), but I didn’t really learn anything practical.
I must confess that this is also mainly because I never really finished the courses. Switching from one course to another every time I had a new idea of something to study or to build did not really help. And, in addition to that, it’s really hard to stay focused when learning on my own. Nothing really prevented me from going drinking beers with my friends instead of learning Python, haha.
What pushed you to dive deeper into Data Science?
This is when I decided to join Le Wagon. I decided to go for Le Wagon's Bootcamp for these reasons :
- To follow a concrete and effective way to become super good at computers
- To have no choice but to work on a weekly basis and to be sure to be assiduous
- The kick-ass reviews of former students about the Le Wagon Bootcamps (and it deserves it!)
Also, I had to choose between the Data Science and the Web Development Bootcamp. Both are very interesting but the Data Science Bootcamp seemed to be 1) more difficult to learn “alone” and 2) a must-have skill for someone who wants to become a product manager. That's what pushed me to choose the Data Science Bootcamp.
What have been the best parts throughout the Bootcamp for you (so far)?
I had a lot of very cool moments during the Bootcamp but two stand out.
The first best moment was when I was able to apply what I learnt at Le Wagon “in real life”. After the week where we learned to scrape the web, I managed to create a program that “absorbed” the biggest website of real estate agents profiles. These are people I’m supposed to sell my products to and I got 4000 new contacts to explore! It was truly amazing to realize that after only 4 weeks of Le Wagon's Bootcamp, I was already able to apply what I learned in my current job and save dozens of working hours.
The second moment was a few days ago. I'm currently working on a side project and had an idea to create a web interface that scrapes any webpage and transforms it into a pdf. I asked a teacher from Le Wagon to help me with a small error I got. After I managed to create the program and deployed it, I was so happy I sent a message to the teacher in question and explained my accomplishment. He just told me “Why are you surprised it works ? You can create anything with Python”. At this moment, I realized that thanks to Le Wagon, I was now able to create “anything”.
Did you face any difficulties during the Bootcamp and if so how did you overcome those?
At the beginning of the Bootcamp, someone told us “you are going to dream about code, you are going to be very tired, you are going to think that you understand nothing and you are going to be lost… It’s normal ! Trust the process”.
And… it was true! The Bootcamp program does not approach only the surface but goes into the details. Some courses are honestly very hard to follow (especially the ones involving big math) and it is not an easy time.
A way to overcome difficult courses is simply to follow the process: do the exercises, if you struggle (cry and) ask your teammates if they can help you. If everybody struggles (cry together and) ask a teacher to help you…. It’s crazy how Le Wagon's teachers are good and ready to take time to help students!
Can you tell us about your experience in the remote format?
The good thing about the part-time remote Bootcamp is that you have a few days between sessions and you can organize your learning journey “as you want”. But the difficult thing about the part-time remote Bootcamp is that parallel to that, you have a job! It takes resilience to stay motivated and work almost 20 hours a week in addition to a normal job… But it is not impossible and totally worth the extra work :)
What are you planning to do once the Bootcamp is over?
As I said, I joined the Le Wagon Data Science part-time Bootcamp in order to understand the tech & data world, to realize “how things work” and to get a strong technical base in order to become a good product manager. My current goal is to find a company where my technical knowledge will allow me to work with developers/data scientists, to understand their needs and constraints, in order to build the best products we can.
Le Wagon really helped me to enter “the right way” into the tech world. It also made me want to learn more every day and I am already planning on joining the Web Development Bootcamp :)
If you have one piece of advice to share with someone that's thinking of doing the remote Bootcamp, what would it be?
My best advice: Go and join Le Wagon Bootcamps! It’s a true opportunity to learn how to code, to work on real-world projects and to reach your goals if you want to join the wonderful tech world :-) And another concrete piece of advice: Trust the process!
Thank you, François!
