Hello everyone! My name is Simo. I am originally from Finland but grew up in the US, in New York. For my undergraduate degree, I studied Economics and Communications at Saint Louis University, at their campus here in Madrid. This is how I first learned about IE and their great reputation.

I spent the past two years working in San Francisco at a Micro-finance NGO and Fin-tech startup. During this time, I realized the importance of data and knew I wanted to expand my knowledge about Data Science, as well as gain new technical skills. In today’s world, data is everywhere! The people who know how to manage and analyze data will have an upper hand on those who don’t. Thankfully, I found that IE had an Exponential Learning department that offered a Data Science program where I would be able to dive into this interesting and fast-expanding field, as well as get the opportunity to live in Madrid once again!

It is now week 8 of the bootcamp and we have come very far from the first day of the program. If someone had told me that after two months ago, we would already be diving deep into machine learning and data visualization, I would have not believed it to be possible. But with the help of our wonderful professors we have already cover everything from the basics of R, Python, SQL, and Math and Statistics and thus are able to tackle these more complex topics.

Every day that goes by, I am more convinced I made the right decision to study Data Science at IE. This program has exceeded my expectations. It is amazing to see the strong connections we have made with our classmates and within our groups for our final projects in such a short amount of time.

We are now dealing with a real case for our capstone project and have to use all the coding skills we have learned so far in our courses. With my colleagues we are working with McCann trying to predict future sales and the churn of customers for a furniture company in Spain. Everyone in the group brings something different to the table which has exponentially increased the capacity for learning.

The past two months have been some of the most intense and demanding times, which has pushed me to challenge myself in many ways. I am looking forward to December 12^th where we will finally be able to present our findings from our project and showcase all the skills we have learned over the course of the program.