Good morning!
It is currently 9:30 AM
Monday of exam week
so naturally I'm filming a video
I thought
it would be a great opportunity to take you
along on a day in the life of a data
scientist in exam week so you get to see
what it's really like to be studying
data science at the University of Amsterdam.
I'm gonna do a bit of
last-minute studying so I'll show you my
notes and kind of what my course is
about at the moment and then I'll take
you to my example in the city centre
campus and show you around
we're gonna go to the University of Amsterdam merch
pop-up store which just opened at this
campus and we're gonna try to get a
hoodie from the University let's go
wait actually sure you what I'm actually studying 
okay so my course right now is called
applied machine learning and it's
like the core course for data science in
general and I can show you how I take
notes for it and what I use to study so
these are my notes I ran out of white
paper notebooks so I kind of just did it
in red this time and you can kind of see
the structure of the course we did
linear regression, classification, deep
networks, text processing, image analysis
some more cross validation and minimal
supervision and we also had some expert
lectures on recommender systems and GANs
at the end
GANs are the things that came
up in the news lately for making the
portrait that was sold at Christie's so
it's really cool that we're studying
really relevant and new things totally
take notes is based on the lecture
slides of course and I tend to write
really small so then it looks like I have
less to study so I have like one or two
pages actually for each lecture so in
the end it doesn't end up being so much
I have like little graphs and images
that I think we're trying to help
understand sometimes they're really very
small like this one I think this was
like a scientific paper that I just made
into one page and then of course some
exercises
most of the machine learning
is based on math and statistics I'm not
the biggest fan of statistics too
be honest  - I know wrong profession - but I
really really like math and the the kind
of math that we're using in machine
learning is linear algebra so anything
to do with matrices and algebra in
general so polynomial equations and
things like that and a lot of calculus
which is my favorite so we're gonna do a
lot of derivatives to calculate the
minimum point in a function or the
maximum point but you need a minimum and
we have this thing called canvas that a
lot of universities use that's UVA and
we have all our lectures here usually
some of them have videos so you can go
back and watch the lecture you didn't
understand because if you see a slide like
this you might not remember what it was
really about and of course I
cross-reference with the one and only
Coursera machine learning course and
then I just sometimes Google specific
concepts if I want to make sure I'm a
hundred percent getting it so yeah
that's kind of what I'm doing right now
our exam is at 2:00 and it's gonna be
three hours I think and it's a
combination of multiple-choice and open
questions and usually it's things that
you kind of have to figure out on your
own so it's not like remembering a
theorem or the definition of something
it's like having the basis basic
concepts in your head how would you
apply this to a situation you haven't
really seen before which is a lot more
fun and this is only in the masters when
I was doing my bachelor in data science
it was a bit more about remembering and
getting down the basics of course so
yeah that's what studying for data
science is like
hello I hope you can hear me it's a
little bit windy we have a case of
classic Dutch weather today the it's not
really raining but it also looks like it
could any second I'm just walking along
the canals which are everywhere
and the campus I'm going to today is
actually within walking distance of my
house so that's really nice
but otherwise I would be taking the bus
most people bike you'll see bikes parked
around literally everywhere but that's
not really for me I tried it in my first
year of my bachelor but I'm really
really bad at biking and anywhere I go to I will get there super sweaty
and tired and annoyed and that's just
not productive for the rest of my day so
I take public transport whenever I can
especially if it's bad weather like this
because no one likes biking in the rain
although the Dutch people will do it
they are fearless like nothing's gonna
stop them from biking there we go
this is the campus my exam is at.
It's called Roeterseiland
I think I'm sorry for Dutch people
listening oh yeah it's really cool above
the water and I'm gonna try to find a
cafeteria and pop-up merch store before
my exam so Let's gooo
I'm done it's finally over but um yeah I
think it went okay I hope so I don't
want to jinx it but it was a lot though
it was like 20 pages of exercises it was
very very math heavy as well which was
fine but like now my scrap papers look
like a mess Oh
insert a clip of it I also found out that
the merch store that I wanted to go to
to get hoodies is actually not at this
building and not open today so good job
Iulia now I'm gonna go grocery shopping
and get some food so I can cook myself
lunch and/or dinner on a student budget
and then that's the last thing I have to
do today then I am on holiday so I'm
excited about that
so exam is over dinner is done and
that's it for my day I still have one
assignment that is due Wednesday
evening but since it's Monday I'm not
gonna start on that yet I'm just gonna
enjoy the fact that I'm done I'm gonna watch
Netflix or YouTube and go to sleep early I hope you enjoyed coming along with
me today I can also do another video of
more average day ones courses start
again in January and show you around our
lecture halls at our actual campus
Science Park which is where you guessed
it all the science related studies are
housed together hope you enjoyed
watching this and I'll see you next time
you
