You never know where life takes you, so I normally say yes to interesting opportunities. From mid June to the end of September I agreed to teach a 12-week, full-time data science course in Hong Kong. This was the first cohort for the Data Science Immersive at General Assembly.

The course was quite demanding for the students and for myself. In particular, given the full-time nature of the course, I had very little time to enjoy the city of Hong Kong. My schedule was 9am-5pm teaching (lots of speaking, lots of helping), and late at night preparing for the following day. For the students, it was a similar drill: lots of in-class paying attention and exercises, and after class revision and project work.

The course covered a lot of ground in data science and the eleven students were very good by keeping up with the course. In particular, I had no problem explaining advanced machine learning concepts with students understanding every graph and formula.

I am very happy with the final outcome of the course, and I am confident that students are quite ready to take on data science challenges in the real world.

Below is a presentation I gave to a number of industry guests and the students on graduation day. It gives an idea of the course and the projects they worked on.

So my Hong Kong experience was an example of one such challenge to which I said yes. It was not easy but it was highly rewarding. Not only did I meet and help shape a group of excellent data scientists but also I made some good friends along the way.