Deadline: 10/24 at 11:59 pm
Hey, amazing person! This is the coding assessment for the EM/Dev position in VandyDataScience (or VDS), an undergraduate student organization dedicated to making a positive difference in our local community through the power of numbers📊. So if you're here because you're interested in joining us for 2024-2025, you're in the right place! And we want to take this chance to sincerely thank you for being interested in us 😊😊.
We've got some really cool projects lined up for this year that we are very excited to work on with you. To do this, however, we want to make sure that everyone who joins us is familiar with the kind of tech that we'll be using during the year. This assessment is a chance for you to get experience with the kind of tools we'll be using in VDS and for us to make sure that we can hit the ground running on these super cool projects that we're going to be doing during the year 😎.
The main goal of this assessment is for us to assess your comfort with using data science to solve real-world issues, and we hope you have fun with the problems we've prepared for you! (we are realllyy excited to see the innovative solutions you come up with❗)
In this challenge, you will be selecting a dataset of your choice, cleaning the data, and creating/analyzing/evaluating a model to solve a problem. You are strongly discouraged from using a dataset/problem statement from Kaggle. Choose a topic that genuinely interests you and explore it in a new way!
This challenge runs from 10/1 to 10/24, which means that you'll have until 10/24 at 11:59pm to finish AND submit your assignment. You must submit your work through Github.
There are three levels, with each level directly building off of the last in order to create one full project. You can start by going to Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 to learn the specifics of each problem. All of your notebooks (most of you will have just one) should be in the Submissions folder, notebooks are files titled (name).py or (name).ipynb. Each level is meant to guide you through the process of cleaning a dataset, creating a model to solve a problem, and evaluating the model that you have created. The code used to solve each of these levels should be in the aforementioned folder.
As you are doing the coding challenge, you will be asked some guiding questions for each level. Make sure you are able to answer these questions in order to demonstrate that you really understand what you're doing. We won't be grading these guiding questions, but we expect you to answer them in the next step: Based on your answers and your work on the challenge, complete a short write-up: single-spaced, 11 point font, within 1-2 pages.
The write-up is the portion where you can demonstrate the complete thought processes when you complete the challenge. Be sure to include:
- Background information (1-2 paragraphs)
- Problem statement (1-2 sentences)
- Hypothesis (Optional, but could make your write-up more cohesive)
- Methods (1 or more paragraphs, feel free to include different models you tried but emphasize on the model(s) you choose to report the results on)
- Results and Discussion (One or more paragraphs, include any results).
- Any outside resources that you use (cite your sources!)
Submit your write-up as a PDF. You can commit and push this file along with the rest of your code files!
In addition to your code, you will need to answer some general application questions through this form on our website. You should also be submitting a link to your repository where you have your code submissions and write-up.
All parts of the application are due on Thursday, October 24th at 11:59PM with a 24-hour grace period until Friday, October 25th at 11:59PM. Note: To qualify for the grace period, you need to submit at least two of the three portions of the application completed or almost completed before the due date. For example, if you committed the application questions and the coding challenge and you need a little bit more time on the write-up before the due date, then you can have the extra day to complete your write-up.
Good luck!!! You got this 😁😁
Please do not hesitate to email Ryan, Ann, Isaac, or anyone else from our exec team if you have any questions whatsoever about this assessemnt, VDS, or life.
Q: When is the deadline? A: 10/24 at 11:59 pm! No further commits will be accepted after the deadline has passed unless you qualify for the 24 hour grace period. Make sure you have submitted the application form so that we can keep track of your progress!
Q: What resources can I use? A: Almost anything! Feel free to reference any textbook code solutions, tutorials, StackOverflow posts, and friend who strongly suggests using a while loop instead of hard coding all the cases in line 374. Part of learning is not knowing how to solve problems, and we encourage you to find and use resources to overcome it! Keep in mind however, that learning is not copying code verbatim from someone somwehere. Because of this, the only exceptions to our 'almost anything' rule is generative AI such as ChatGPT and no code machine learning platforms such as AutoML. Be prepared that in later stages we will be asking you to explain the solutions you have come up with in this assessment.
Q: What language should I use? A: We highly recommend Python! Most of the projects we do during the year will use Python, and we will give bonus points to anyone who chooses to use Python in their assessment. Ultimately the language you choose is up to you, though keep in mind some languages are better suited for certain problems hint hint wink wink 😉
Q: How will I be graded? A: Here is the criteria we will be judging on:
- Problem Solution
- Does the solution you chose make sense in context of the problem?
- Code Readability
- If you left your code and came back to it three years later, could you still understand it?
- Explanation
- How clearly did you explain your thinking process and solution? -We are looking for clear, succinct comments within the code. Overly lengthy comments may not be considered as good explanations.
Q: How do I use Github? A: Follow the steps below:
To get local access to your own version of the coding challenge, clone the repository using Github. In the box that says "Repository name," name your repository '[name]_coding_challenge'. Set to public and click "create repository." All other options can be left alone. Once you get to your repository, click the green button that says "Code" and clone the repository using the web url. When you are done working on your repository, commit and push all changes. Your repository should contain all your code and your write-up PDF. Submit the link to your repository through the general application along with your answers to the questions.
Q: I finished the challenge, what next? A: Congratulations on finishing the challenge!! Please submit the link to your Github repository through the general application form, which can be found here. After 10/24, we will begin judging all submissions and you can expect an email from us within 1-2 weeks. This is the stage where we will be sending out invitations to interviews! If you need any help submitting your work through Github, reach out to us!
Did you:
- Push all of your code to your repository?
- Push the PDF of your write-up to your repository?
- Answer all of the questions on the application form?
- Submit the link to your repository in the form above?