DS Portfolio (Advice Online)

I want to hear about a project they’ve worked on recently. I ask them about how the project started, how they determined it was worth time and effort, their process, and their results. I also ask them about what they learned from the project. I gain a lot from answers to this question: if they can tell a narrative, how the problem related to the bigger picture, and how they tackled the hard work of doing something.

I love projects where people show that they are interested in data in a way that goes beyond homework assignments. Any sort of class final project where you explore an interesting dataset and find interesting results… Put effort into the writeup… I really like seeing really good writeups where people find interesting and novel things…have some visualizations and share their work.

I find that the best portfolio projects are less about doing fancy modeling and more about working with interesting data. A lot of people do things with financial information or Twitter data; those can work, but the data isn’t inherently that interesting, so you’re working uphill.