Any techie who has glanced at a job board recently has most likely seen dozens of postings for data science jobs, and for good reason. It is estimated that by 2020, for every human being on the planet, about 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created. With so much data being generated worldwide, there is a serious need for data analysts to clean and prepare this data to make sense of it and apply it to a greater understanding of society.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, this demand for data science jobs is greater than anywhere else in the country. As one of the world’s leading tech capitals, San Francisco is no stranger to the reality of data and the need to find workers with the skills to analyze it. For those who wish to get a better understanding of this increasingly popular field, the city boasts plenty of opportunities to dive headfirst into data. Covering everything from functions and methods to SQL and Python, these 10 data science bootcamps online and in the San Francisco Bay Area will give you the skills you need to land your dream data role.
Top Data Science Bootcamps in San Francisco
- General Assembly
- Metis
- Galvanize
- DataCamp
- Dataquest
Location: Mid-Market
Course overview: Flatiron School’s San Francisco campus offers a data science bootcamp for aspiring data scientists and data analysts. Over the course of 15 weeks, students will cover a broad range of topics including an introduction to Python and SQL, statistics, A\B testing and linear regression, machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing. Learners conclude the program with a large-scale data science and machine learning project, which tests their ability to construct a project that gathers and builds statistical or machine learning models to deliver insights and communicate findings through data visualization and storytelling.
Pricing: $17,000
Location: Financial District
Course overview: General Assembly provides a four-month, in-person immersive data science bootcamp, which prepares students to take on a variety of data roles. The program familiarizes students with the essentials of data science, including data mining, statistical modeling, Python and machine learning. Students also learn how to power business forecasts and drive decision-making and strategy through a variety of advanced techniques, such as recommender systems, neural networks and computer vision models. Throughout the course, students will create compelling stakeholder presentations and data visualizations, collaborating with software engineering and UX design students or real-world clients.
Pricing: $15,950
Location: The East Cut
Course overview: Metis offers a 12-week, in-person data science bootcamp, which introduces students to real-world experience as they complete five projects and build their portfolios. The first week involves an introduction to data science, including Python, Bash Shell, data wrangling and Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA). The course then dives into more advanced aspects of data science, such as linear regression theory and application, statistics review, Bayes Theorem, SQL concepts, classification and regression trees, deep learning and neural networks. Some students may be eligible for a $3,000 program scholarship, including women, members of the LGBTQ+ community and veterans of U.S. military personnel.
Pricing: $17,000
Location: Online
Course overview: NYC Data Science Academy offers a six-month, online data science bootcamp. The bootcamp is comprised of a comprehensive set of materials, including lecture videos, slides, homework and solutions, code reviews, jump-start sessions and guest speaker talks. Students cover a variety of topics, such as Python and R for data analysis, machine learning with R and Python, database management tools like AWS and NoSQL and how to build deep learning models in TensorFlow. The company has a dedicated online learning platform, which is designed to foster communication between instructors, teaching assistants and peers, as well as an online meeting portal that allows students to schedule meetings with industry-expert mentors.
Pricing: $17,600
Location: Oakland, Greater San Francisco Bay Area
Course overview: Funded by Cornell University, The Data Incubator offers an advanced, eight-week data science bootcamp for aspiring data scientists pursuing a PhD or Master’s degree. The program is designed to build on the preparation students receive during their academic training, covering a range of key skills, such as numerical techniques for optimization and vectorized linear algebra and programming tools like Python, NumPy and Matplotlib. Students study other topics as well, including handling unstructured data, topic modeling, hypothesis testing, ensemble methods, variance-bias decomposition, data normalization and regression and classification. It is recommended that applicants have a strong background in probability, statistics and experience with programming, scripting or statistical packages.
Pricing: Free
Location: The East Cut
Course overview: Galvanize provides a 13-week data science immersive bootcamp that involves a Python-based curriculum, real-world case studies and machine learning concepts. Divided into four quarters, the program curriculum covers a wide range of topics related to data science, including statistical analysis, classification, regression, clustering using structured and unstructured data sets, natural language processing, recommender systems and neural networks. Throughout the course, students work on three “capstone projects,” as well as several group case studies, using real-world data while practicing team-based software development.
Pricing: $17,980
Location: China Basin
Course overview: Insight Data Science offers a seven-week, in-person postdoctoral training fellowship that bridges the gap between academia and data science. The program enables scientists to learn industry-specific skills needed to work in the field of big data at leading companies. Students will cover a variety of topics, including software engineering best practices, storing and retrieving data, statistical analysis, machine learning and visualizing and communicating results. At the end of the course, students interview with top companies across the country, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Airbnb.
Pricing: Free
Location: Online
Course overview: DataCamp provides a wide range of online data science courses geared towards beginners. In the Introduction to R course, students learn how to manipulate common data structures like vectors, matrices and data frames. The Introduction to Python course teaches students powerful ways to store and manipulate data and data science tools to conduct their own analyses, covering topics like functions, methods, packages and NumPy. During the Intro to SQL for Data Science course, students learn syntax in SQL shared by many types of databases, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle, covering skills like how to select columns, filter rows and aggregate functions.
Pricing: Free for access to the first chapter of each course, $29 per month for the monthly subscription and $25 per month for the yearly subscription.
Location: Online
Course overview: Dataquest offers a wide range of online courses covering data science, including four different guided career paths, which are geared towards both beginners and intermediate learners. The Data Analyst in R career path prepares people to work as data analysts using R, covering the fundamentals of R syntax, how to dig into data analysis and data visualization using popular tidyverse packages, and more. During the Data Analyst in Python track, students cover the fundamentals of Python, as well as query databases with SQL. In the Data Scientist in Python path, students learn the skills required to become a data scientist using Python, including how to program in popular languages, how to clean and visualize data and how to make predictions using statistics and machine learning. The Data Engineer in Python track teaches students how to build data pipelines to work with large data sets, including how to work with production databases and key concepts like data structures, algorithms and recursion.
Pricing: Packages start at $29 per month.
Location: Online
Course overview: In collaboration with EMERITUS, the Professional Certificate in Applied Data Science from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth is a six-month, online data science course. The program is structured around one-on-one career coaching, regular live webinars, rigorous, graded assignments and small group mentoring sessions. Throughout the course of the program, students cover a variety of data science topics, including data structures and plotting, statistics and probability, linear models, data visualization strategies, experimental design and machine learning. This program is ideal for those with a demonstrated knowledge of calculus, linear algebra, statistics and probability.
Pricing: $12,500
