The Precourse

The Application Process

The application process starts with a simple essay about yourself, why you want to join the program, and what qualifications you have that are relevant to the program as well the usual required information about yourself that any organization would want to know about (ie, your name etc,). The application is very pragmatic and straight to the point.  This isn't a college application and it shouldn't take much time.  Furthermore, there isn't a fee associated with applying.  Just don't expect the quickest responses.

After some time, you'll hear from someone at Zipfian Academy who will give you the application work to do as a test to see if you are qualified to be part of the program.  The work consists of some data analysis, a very complex SQL query which will take a lot of thought, some basic statistics, and some coding (from what I remember).

The only difficult aspect of the work was crafting the SQL query.  I just finished crafting numerous queries for a website but I even had trouble carefully making this query.

The Interview

There were two interviews which are both done on Google Hangout with a collaborative text document.  One was a coding interview which consisted of you coding in online textpad while the interviewer watches you.  The question was relatively simple and did not require advanced knowledge of algorithms but did take some thought.  The purpose of this interview is to see if you can code in Python and see if you can grasp basic programming skills like efficiency and algorithms. I've had interviews with many companies including Google and I had to say this was a very engaging and relaxing interview.  It felt very much like the run of the mill Software Engineering interview and not much else.

The second interview consisted of statistical questions and some questions regarding the data analysis during the homework for the application.  There were also questions on probability and distributions.  Some of the questions could be answered with counting but they all could be solved with a bit of critical thinking.  The purpose of this interview is to test the limits of your knowledge of statistics.  So you may feel incompetent near the end of the interview.  I had questions that I just could not answer and passed on them.  I'm sure those with a math or statistics background would perform much better then I would.  For those who felt like they did not do all too well, don't fret.  I performed poorly in this interview but was still accepted into the program.

The Precourse Work

The Precourse Work consisted of a multitude of assignments.  The most important assignments was the Python coding assignments and the SQL queries.  Most of the content will help you prepare for the program.  There's an introduction to Pandas and the other packages for Python.  There's a mini data analysis project and a lot of extra credit if you wish to go the mile.  The work takes about a few days part time.  I estimate about 20 hours if you really don't carefully go over the reading materials and maybe more if you do.

I started a week prior to the beginning of the program and ended finishing everything the night before the first day of the program.