P(late post | busy weekend) = 1.0

February 28, 2016March 5, 2016 by Jane Huston

Another week done at Galvanize! It’s been a full week and a busy weekend, so I’m posting a bit later than I’d like. Also my jokes are getting nerdier (see post’s title) though I’m OK with that. This week was all about…

Photo credit: LendingMemo

…Statistics! I was excited about this since I’ve had some stats classes in the past. My classes had generally focused on frequentist statistics, which is just one approach to statistical thinking. I’d previously learned basic inferential statistics and hypothesis testing, so I was (nerdily) most excited to learn more about Bayesian statistics. I’ve mostly approached statistics within the context of public health research or drug development, so thinking about the parallels to web traffic, for example was new to me.

Some of the highlights for me this week were learning about bootstrapping, getting some practice with Bayesian methods and calculating Bayesian posteriors, and learning about different approaches to A/B testing. The final assignment of the week was to work on the “multi-armed bandit” problem, where we explored different ways that one might test versions of a webpage to determine which generates the most clicks. It’s pretty cool to see how you can set up an experiment that will automatically converge on the version with the best click through rate… assuming you’ve implemented your algorithms correctly.

I’ll also point out that each week, we work on 5 different individual assignments and 5 pair assignments, where we practice pair programming with another person in our cohort. This has been a great way to 1.) meet everyone in our cohort! and 2.) learn from each other. Each day, you might end up with someone who knows more or less about the particular topic than you, or sometimes the pair is pretty equally matched. Either way, you definitely learn a lot from each other! I’ve enjoyed this aspect of the program, especially knowing that pair programming is a popular approach in industry.

The Adventure Begins!

February 20, 2016March 5, 2016 by Jane Huston

My cohort and I celebrated surviving our first week of the Galvanize Data Science bootcamp! I know I was excited and nervous at the beginning of the week, not knowing how quickly we would move through topics, what the days would feel like, or who would be sitting in the classroom alongside me. It feels great to have answered many of those questions– especially meeting and getting to know my fellow bootcampers!

The focus this week was software engineering, including object-oriented programming and using a few key Python libraries. Big picture, I think my most important lesson learned is the importance of planning before starting to code. Thinking through the structure of how you want to address the problem and what you want to build really can make writing the actual code a lot smoother.

Lesson 1: There’s very little camping in bootcamp

One piece of advice that I am hoping to take to heart for the next 12 weeks reflecting each day on “what do I know now that I didn’t know yesterday?” I’m not sure if I’ll keep documenting that here, but at least for week 1, I identified the following (sometimes small) victories:

Day 1: I used sys.arg with ease to create a program I could pass arguments to when calling from the terminal.

Day 2: I felt my understanding of classes/OOP really grew today. I found the assignment to implement an interactive blackjack game really challenging but rewarding. At the end of the night, I had at least a basic, functional game up and running.

Day 3: I much better understand the different types of joins. This had definitely tripped me up before when using SQL.

Day 4: I now actually understand how you filter specific columns or rows from a Pandas dataframe. (Pandas is a popular Python library for data analysis). I’ve played around with Pandas before, but always used a lot of trial and error to select the column or row I care about.

Next week we move onto probability and statistics. I’ve taken a few statistics classes in the past, so I’m very interested to see how much is review and how much is new!

Why health tech needs MPHs

February 12, 2016February 21, 2016 by Jane Huston

While reading this Fast Company article about health care tech companies, I was struck by the following quote:

“The tech community isn’t used to dealing with studies, FDA approval, publications, and reimbursement…[but] the tech community wants things to happen fast. Obviously that doesn’t work in health care.”

I believe new technology and innovative approaches will be a net positive to the health care industry, but I think this article highlights the need for health tech companies to listen and learn from the current state of the industry. Those with industry experience are going to be invaluable partners– yes, even experience in the industry they are trying desperately to disrupt.

One of most important skills/values I learned during my MPH degree was the importance of evidence base. If you’re going to set policies or recommendations that affect how thousands (or millions) of people receive care, you need to be as confident as possible that you’re recommending the right things. One professor’s quote that I’ve never forgotten: “If a doctor makes a mistake, he or she might be responsible for the death of the patient. When a public health professional makes a mistake, they could be responsible for thousands of deaths.”

No more snake oil please.

Motivated by that principle, my classmates and I spent our time learning how to collect data and interpret it to find meaning; to evaluate new research by critically reading methods sections in academic literature; to understand who sets medical practice standards, recommends preventive measures or screening, or monitors food safety, drugs, or devices; and learning some of the complexities of who pays for care and who determines what gets paid for.

I think all of the above skills and ways of thinking will be really useful to emerging health tech companies, and I hope they’ll value that input. Not to say they aren’t already, but based on the above article, it certainly seems like it could be time for more MPH graduates to migrate into health tech.