Update!

• I have officially graduated from George Mason University. 
• I successfully completed the "America's Constitution: A Biography" course

Other than that, I had to give up on some Coursera courses to prepare for some job interviews. For now, it looks like a few contractors and a couple agencies are considering me for some policy research positions. 

One more note about my programming studies:

I found out there isn't a way to "study" programming. No amount of detailed note taking really improved my ability to do anything with the R programming language. Passive viewing of lectures, writing down very basic rules, and hands-on practice are the only ways I've been able to gather precious nuggets of programming knowledge. It's weird and feels very different from typical study methods for academia. I remember memorizing over half of the content that made up my college degree. History, writing, basic finance and economics formulas, trig identities, etc. were all memorized and hardly understood at anything remotely close to first principles.

Anyway, back to work. For real this time.

The Road to Data Science Mastery: Part 2, Programming (aka going nuts)

This is what programming feels like to someone who isn't well versed in the field:

1. You learn about objects, vectors, functions, and for loops.
2. You begin an assignment feeling like a god.
3. You find out that your first lessons in programming didn't truly prepare you for true programming work. It's like being given a few lessons in karate and then being sent off to fight Bruce Lee. (Exaggerating, obviously)

It's a roller coaster of emotions and hissyfits. I thought programming was just pure logic. And you know what? It really is about logic. But there's a creative streak to programming in that you can accomplish a task through multiple methods. So, in a way, programming feels kind of artistic and can be difficult when you're not feeling creative.

It's all worth the effort though. I've never felt such accomplishment from any other subject I studied and practiced. 

Whelp, time to go back into isolation and finish my programming assignments!

P.S.

I should've made a post titled, "The Road to Data Science Mastery: Part 1"  and written about why I want to pursue data science. Oops. 

Oops, I did it again. Repeated a college mistake.

I got sidetracked from my Coursera studies and now I'm paying the price by burning the midnight oil to make up for lost time. I spent two days of very valuable time doing research on which $400ish laptop to purchase. I made mistakes such as this back in college and paid dearly when it came to coming to quizzes without any proper preparation. 

Thankfully, Coursera courses offer a few "late days" that serve as due date extensions in case the student had an unavoidable schedule conflict. I didn't want to use them so early on in the courses, but it looks like I'll have to burn them if I want to get full credit on my assignments and quizzes.

By the way, the courses I'm currently working on are:

1. America's Written Constitution 
2. Surveillance Law
3. Statistics (not the actual course name)
4. R Programming <---- fun class so far, but it can be a bit challenging when it comes to understanding everything. I'm trying to force myself to sort of "skim" over material and trust that the hands-on assignments and tutorials will solidify my understanding of basic R programming concepts. 

If you're curious to see what the coursework involved and what a verified certificate looks like:

You can view my course record here:

https://www.coursera.org/records/RxMP2uVCFbKvaqTY

And here is my certificate:

https://www.coursera.org/maestro/api/certificate/get_certificate?verify-code=6FE95U4VCA


It wasn't the most difficult course. Anyone can pass this class with distinction by simply following the instructions. But you know what? It feels good to be done with the first class of the Data Science Specialization.

Onward to learning R Programming and sharpening my knowledge of statistics!

Got some grades back from Coursera...

I passed my Data Scientist's Toolbox course with no issues whatsoever! Well, except for the first quiz where I missed one point on a question and forgot to retake the quiz. Uploading the Coursera certificate to my linkedin and other online profiles may not affect my life much, but it'll feel so very satisfying.

On another note, I'd like to mention one neat feature for work verification. Each student had to grade four other students' projects on both content and legitimacy. If the graded work looks suspicious, then students can report the work and add comments about any funny details they noticed. I'm guessing a minimum of these submissions are required to alert Coursera's staff. I might write a little more about this grading feature when I learn more about it.

What I did today:

1. Finished week 2 of "America's Written Constitution" which is being offered by Yale University on Coursera. Professor Amar's lectures are very entertaining and informative. I wish more law courses were taught from a historical perspective since law on its own can be a very dry subject.
2. Started the first week of another course. I won't talk about it in great detail right now since I'm barely in the first week of lectures. 
3. Applied to a couple bank teller positions. I honestly wouldn't mind being a teller. Developing a wealth of finance terms and getting work experience in a position that demands lots of responsibility sounds like a decent career move. The tuition benefits wouldn't hurt either, whether the benefits include college tuition reimbursement or training programs. 
4. Reviewed some basic calculus. I don't have an urgent need to know calculus, but I want to maintain a working knowledge of at least differential calculus. You never know when abstract background mathematics knowledge can come in handy. *cough*statistics*cough*
5. Found a study conducted by Duke University on how employers view MOOCs. I haven't read it yet, but I'll start skimming it over as bedtime reading. 

Whelp, now I have to prepare for the next day. Tomorrow's schedule:

• shop for winter clothing (Most "fun" part of the day)
• draft a couple cover letters
• study a bit
• start planning out how I'll seriously prepare for the first half of the A+ certification

Burnout

I don't feel burned out from job applications and studying. To be honest, every bit of frustration I've felt has quickly morphed into some weird form of determination. Thankfully, I've been feeling healthy in terms of body and mind for the past couple months. I have kept to my study schedule and started incorporating more daily walks in order to offset the stress that comes from studying in an uncomfortable chair.

Everything is calm and the horizon looks just fine, but I still fear feeling burnt from completing stressful tasks. I hate the feeling of not being able to bounce back from a stressful activity because the guilty feelings of not being productive usually follow prolonged stress. Maybe I ought to add weightlifting and trips to the local parks to my schedule. I could certainly use the exercise and outdoor scenery usually helps me recover from a tedious assignment or job application process.

Anyone know of a few scenic areas in Northern Virginia?

Example of a decent Coursera grading policy and my thoughts on incentivizing actual studying:

"Here is how the final grade for America's Written Constitution will be calculated. 

In-video quizzes accompany each lecture. They do not count toward your final grade. They are provided so that you can assess your comprehension through immediate feedback. You will be able to answer each in-video quiz question up to 3 times. 

You will be asked to take three Mastery Quizzes throughout the course. Each quiz will contain 5-10 questions. You will only be allowed to submit each quiz one time. You will have one week to complete each quiz in order to be eligible for full credit. After the first deadline passes, you will have one additional week to submit your quiz if you missed the first deadline. However, your grade on that quiz will be reduced by 5% each day that passes. 

You will be asked to submit two writing assignments that will be reviewed and graded by three of your peers. In addition, in order to be eligible for full credit on the written assignments, you will need to grade three of your classmates written assignments. 

Together, the quizzes are worth 60% of your total grade. The two writing assignments are worth 40% (each essay is 20%).

You will have the opportunity to earn a Signature Track Verified Certificate in this course. Students will need to earn a final grade of 70% or greater to successfully complete the course, and achieve the Signature Track Verified Certificate."

-You can find this grading policy and other class content here. There is one advantage MOOCs have over most online college courses: complete clarity. You don't have to pay money or commit to the course in order to see what the coursework and content are all about.

I absolutely love this grading policy. The coursework isn't especially difficult since it is an introductory history (and law) course, but the grading policy is strict compared to other Coursera courses. Some courses that are meant to be provide basic knowledge of a field will allow you to attempt a quiz or assignment up to a hundred times. Letting students have a few attempts at an assignment seems reasonable. Most Coursera students don't get the chance to go over assignments with a knowledgeable instructor and cannot fix mistakes before making a final submission. To make up for the lack of human fail-safes, most assignments provide automated feedback on the student's errors. From there, the student can learn from mistakes and attempt the assignment again.

However, giving a student this feedback alongside one-hundred attempts with no grade penalties certainly gives opportunities to abuse this system. For instance, I could fail my Surveillance Law quizzes and simple copy the quiz answers in order to get perfect scores on later attempts. The students looking to just pad their resumes with these courses won't care to truly master the course material and will cheat their way through these assessments. This cheating won't help the students learn and will dilute the reputation of these courses when these students cannot prove they learned anything.

One way to curb abuse of these grading systems is to limit assessment attempts to a very finite number that allows opportunities for mastery and unique quizzes. For instance, three attempts would allow a student to mess up the first time and then succeed with higher scores on following attempts. The finite number of attempts would let instructors prepare three unique assessments that cover the same course material while making it (marginally) more difficult to simply copy and paste answers from previous attempts.

Or, the instructor can take a gamble and trust that both students and the Coursera platform won't have technical issues that spoil an assessment attempt (such as submission errors) and offer one attempt for each quiz. It is still easy to cheat, I suppose. All it takes is one person to pass the assessment and then distribute the answers to everyone else. Even then, some students won't want to risk their only attempt at a good grade off someone else's answers. Instead, those students will AT LEAST attempt to gain background knowledge of the course material before deciding to use someone else's answers.

-----

I wanted to include the below paragraph in my "actual" post (the above text), but saw too many flaws in the solution. Even with the very recognizable flaws of this suggestion, I think it provides good food for thought on combating cheating in MOOCs. 

There might be ways to counter this cheat-sheet sharing activity such as having Coursera staff create and distribute bogus cheat-sheets in order to dilute the reputation of sources that provide free quiz answers. Students will hedge against the risk of using bogus cheat-sheets by actually gaining (at least) background knowledge of the course material in order to ensure that their cheat-sheets are accurate. 

A couple flaws right off the bat:

• costly in terms of time
• identifying the bogus sheets won't be too difficult. The bogus cheat-sheets would have to incentivize people to use them while not giving students amazing grades. There would be enough good answers to provide initial impressions that the cheat-sheet is accurate but would also contain incorrect answers to result in an unfavorable grade of something in the ballpark of 60 to 70%. Keep in mind most courses require around 75% for a statement of accomplishment and usually at least or more than 90% in order to pass "with distinction." 

----
p.s.

I got a 5 out of 6 on the first quiz of "America's Written Constitution." I studied for no more than half an hour and only got an 83%. These single attempt quizzes really did make me want to understand the course material but clearly I didn't study hard enough. Oh well, I'll just have to do better on the following quizzes.

Completed my first MOOC, verified certificate and all!

I'm just about finished with my first Coursera Data Science specialization MOOC! While this is news worth celebrating, I should note that the course was just an easy Git tutorial titled "The Data Scientist's Toolbox."

Course content

It's a great course for those who have never been exposed to command line interfaces and forms of cloud computing. The lecture material barely skimmed over some broad data science principles and then went into depth about the Data Science specialization structure. Quizzes were based on lecture material and were pretty easy to pass. Basically, you will pass the quizzes with flying colors if you simply watch the lectures. The course project involved learning about GitHub, installing Git Bash, installing R and R Studio, and using Git Bash to push files (called repositories in the GithHb community) onto GitHub. In all, the course project was a simple but well detailed tutorial on using some simple software. If you're experienced with command line interfaces and Git, then this is a course you can finish within an hour. If you're totally new to this stuff, then this course should take no longer than a week to master. 

Coursera's verification process and its faults:

What wasn't so great about this Coursera course was the verification process. To be fair, Coursera's means of authenticating one's work is no better than the authentication process I experienced in a couple online courses I took at George Mason University. Some GMU courses would utilize a lockdown application that prevents you from opening other applications while the online test is opened. Other GMU courses didn't include authentication procedures for online quizzes. Coursera's verification process, known as Signature Track, works as follows:

1. Take a picture of yourself before taking a quiz or submitting an assignment. This photo will be compared to a photo of your driver's license or other identification, which you provide when you initially sign up and pay for the Signature Track service.
2. Type a phrase. When you sign up for Signature Track, you type a phrase multiple times. The patterns derived from the multiple entries become your biometric identity.

Certainly, this means of verification beats doing nothing to link a student's authorship to assignments. However, cheating can still easily happen. I could go through the verification process and then hand my computer to another student. Or, I can copy and paste code or essays and probably slip through the peer grading system used by some Coursera courses. 

I hope Coursera adopts a stronger verification process. Of course, the point of taking a MOOC isn't to get the certification but to gain knowledge and skills. But I would love to see MOOCs become credentials that can at least reliably signal a certificate holder's  tenacity to employers since some of these MOOCs demand quite a bit of grit.

Coursera compared to Udacity:

Nobody likes a complaint that doesn't come with suggestions for alternatives, but sadly my complaint about Signature Track doesn't come with seriously good suggestions. Coursera could more closely imitate Udacity's (another MOOC provider) model and charge more money for courses in order to provide more human support for the online classes. Udacity assigns coaches and instructors to students and arranges one-on-one tutoring sessions, so at least the tuition fees are used to create a human connection. I'm not very knowledgeable Udacity's policies and procedures, but I believe these connections create greater accountability when it comes to verifying that a student is doing honest work. 

This idea of imitating Udacity would ultimately mean putting verified certifications out of financial reach for many Coursera users, or at least make Coursera's courses less attractive in comparison to other institutions of learning such as community colleges. Right now, the courses that offer the Signature Track verification process are priced at $49 per class. That's incredibly cheap for just about anyone living in a developed country. Compare that to Udacity's monthly fee of $200 and keep in mind that Udacity wants to keep its tuition fees as low as possible while providing strong credentials. While $200 a month is...reasonably cheap, it feels like a few more added tuition services would set the tuition fee high enough to make community college courses competitive. At this moment, I don't have many good ideas that would improve the verification processes of MOOCs without increasing the price of verified MOOCs to the point where community college courses become comparatively attractive.

Short term career goals and my current schedule

I recently started filling out applications for several entry level positions for research, management, and even random filler positions at offices that involve attending seminars. If I get a decent job in the near future, then I'm happy. If not, then I will keep applying while doing something useful to keep moving forward.

I've known for a while that it might be a long time before I get hired. To keep myself productive, I've kept myself on this schedule:

Sunday:

• Coursera's Surveillance Law course. View lectures and take notes, finish a reading assignment.
• Knock out a few Data Science lectures and work on the course project. 

Monday:

• Review mathematics either through Khan Academy's "Mastery Challenge" or Coursera's Calculus 1 course. (Lately I've been doing a bit of both.)
• Complete at least a quarter of a lesson from Udacity's Introduction to Computer Science course. 

Tuesday and Wednesday:

• Study material for the Security A+ exam for at least one hour.
• Fill out job applications 
• Work at Jungles Gym. (This is my part time job. It doesn't pay much, but a meager income is better than none. And to be fair, my customers and coworkers are wonderfully kind and have been helping me with my job hunt.)

Thursday:

• Coursera's Surveillance Law course. View lectures and take notes, finish a reading assignment.
• Data science lectures, course project, and get started on quizzes. I usually finish the quizzes by the end of the week.

Friday:

• Review mathematics
• Complete at least a quarter of a lesson from Udacity's Introduction to Computer Science course. 

Saturday:

• Relax.  (Oftentimes"relaxing" is the comfort that can come from being productive. I usually spend a small part of this day on my studies.)
• Finish job applications or at least make notes of the qualifications I cannot meet if I'm truly interested in the job.

This schedule is probably about equal to a 9 credit semester at college. It's enough to keep me busy but gives me enough free time to handle family commitments. The main reason I'm keeping the coursework at a controlled level is that the topics I'm studying are challenging, at least for me. I wouldn't say I'm awful at mathematics and information technology, but I certainly need to improve my grasp on the two subjects for the jobs I will ultimately be doing.

Long term goals:

When I am hired at a higher paying job, I will look at options for returning to school. Finance, business management, information technology, computer science, and statistics come to mind for my extended education.

Every so often I wonder if the past will repeat itself when it comes to returning to school. I don't want to squander the opportunities that come with a college education. For now, I'm confident that my new study habits will result in a much more rewarding college experience. I just have to keep improving myself and remember to manage myself properly. Maybe, this Saturday, I'll come out with a post regarding my college and post adolescence screw-ups and what I learned from them. 

Explanation behind the lame title

Compared to so many other people in the world, I've been given the good life. I was born into a financially stable household, grew up in nice communities, and just finished a B.S. in economics with the help of my parents. I'm very grateful that life wasn't more harsh.

Then again, even the luckiest people experience some dark moments of their own. These situations might be awful or composed of trite problems depending on your perspective. I hate to say my own high school to college years gave me the worst time of my life. I didn't manage my time, squandered opportunities to do well in all my classes, and experienced some turmoil in my most valued relationships. Couple each of those problems with my personality, and you have a situation featuring some bloke who is going to experience lots of hard knocks before figuring out how to manage and even enjoy his life. I won't go into details about what my problems were, but trust me when I say that I learned how to move on and focus on improving.

One piece of hard-won wisdom I gained is that I cannot simply be rid of all my problems while simultaneously improving myself in several dimensions. It takes patience, planning, humility, and optimism in knowing that happiness has a steep price that's worth paying. I want to travel, make a living as an economics researcher, and take care of the people I love. I set a pretty high goal for myself, but I will definitely get there. Traveling the road to success will be a matter of taking one step at a time.