As the end of my first year on the Data Science degree apprenticeship approaches, I’m realising how far I have come. I mean, before I started this degree, I thought that machine learning was like a really smart macro recorder! This week I’ve had some time with my tutors and they’ve been giving us quizzes that Read More
A Level Maths, Properly
So one of the things that I am now sure causes me a lot of trouble in maths are the missing foundational understanding I have in it. I’ve been fighting against it for a long time, because I can manage some of the advanced stuff with little problem, but that is only getting me so far. Read More
Maths is very hard!
See title. That’s basically it, mathematics is very hard, calculus, linear algebra, and now I need to learn how to solve differential equations. I believe I can get it eventually, but I’m not sure I can get it soon enough for the exams in August… but I can sure as hell try. Anyway, that’s the whole Read More
Second Chance At Higher Learning
Yesterday was the first meeting between myself, the university and my workplace, to assess how the apprenticeship is going and plan actions going forwards. I was quite anxious about it, for one because I hadn’t been documenting the study leave I’d taken as part of the apprenticeship and rushed to get it all down the evening Read More
We’ve Done It Boys And Girls!
Did I post about my actual portfolio submission yet? No I did not! So here it is, a whole day late. Yesterday was the deadline for my first portfolio submission on my Data Science apprenticeship and I’m glad to say that I got everything submitted the night before, so I had the whole morning to panic Read More
My First Portfolio Submission
I’ve just finished the last piece for my portfolio submission, with the deadline being tomorrow noon. That may seem like I’ve left it quite late, and I have, but in my defense I had been fighting against an incredibly strong level of demotivation beforehand. I’d gotten myself to a point where I really wasn’t sure that Read More
Getting Better At Learning
A few months ago, I was worrying a lot about learning maths, probability, statistics and writing essays. I’m still not where I think I should be on any of those things, but something really good happened. One weekend I holed myself up in a room to write a report for my Data Science apprenticeship. I watched Read More
Liability Reduction Celebration Cake
Today whilst watching episodes of the Sketch show on YouTube, I saw a sketch with cake in it, and I realised that amongst all the high fiving, hugging, kissing and general celebrating yesterday, I didn’t even plan to have a cake! To me, all proper celebrations have a cake. Part of the reason that we didn’t Read More
Happy Liability Reduction Day
It’s been a long time since I last wrote and honestly I’ve just been prioritising a lot of other things ahead of writing. But today is a very good day and a day to write about that, as with the pandemic and people staying home to keep themselves safe, a bit of good news is worth Read More
An Important Message About Self Care During The Pandemic
I live in the UK and on Sunday night our current leader, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was admitted to hospital after 10 days with worsening COVID-19 symptoms. Until that point, his ministers and aides had been spreading the message that he was suffering only mild symptoms, continued to work from self-isolation and was expected to be Read More