I wrote this exactly a year ago - since then I have completed the Microsoft Professional Program for Big Data, again working in my spare time.

I am delighted to have now completed the Microsoft Professional Program for Data Science. It has been 10 online courses (taking a total of 322 hours) over just more than 11 months and my average (mean) mark over the 10 courses was 96.6%. The final course was a capstone project which involved analysing data from the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, building a model to help predict the degree of damage to buildings (amongst other things to help emergency response teams prioritise rescue efforts) and producing a report on this. This was an extremely practical way to complete the course.

I have created a series of slides (collected together in a Microsoft Sway online document) showing the main stages of my journey.  This should give you a pretty good flavour of the sort of work required on the course (and I hope will help people contemplating doing this or a similar course - I wish you the very best in your own data science journey!).

You can see the slides at https://sway.com/lsUjwGITuGFpsHIM?ref=Link