Deadline: 10/16 at 11:59 pm
Heya 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 this 2023 year, 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❗)
This challenge runs from 10/2 to 10/16, which means that you'll have until 10/16 at 11:59pm to finish AND submit your assignment. You must submit your work through the OA Website. Any work submitted after the due date will not be considered.
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 Notebook(s) 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, though each level will have a mini challenge you should submit (the directions are in each level).
Good luck!!! You got this 😁😁
Please do not hesitate to email Adaline, Brooke, and Chloe if you have any questions whatsoever about this assessemnt, VandyDataScience, or life.
Q: When is the deadline? A: 10/16 at 11:59 pm! No further commits will be accepted after the deadline has passed.
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?
- Bonus Points (will not hurt your application, only help it)
- Explained in each level!
Q: I finished the assessment, what next? A: Congratulations on finishing the assessment!! Please submit your work on the OA Website so we can review your work (unsubmited work, even if it is completed, will not be evaluated). After 10/16, 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!