Hacker News Reader

Comment by edem | Hacker News Reader

I really like to get a degree in Mathematics but I simply don't have the time to throw at it (work, children, etc). What do you suggest I should do to have something on my resume? MOOC maybe?

View on HN

Usually MOOC for resume don't help as everyone does them. The advice that I found useful for resume building is working on projects that you can catalog in a portfolio.

With regards to gaining math skills, this upcoming MOOC from Microsoft on EdX looks promising[1].

[1] https://www.edx.org/course/essential-mathematics-for-artific...

Link didn't work for me. This one [1] did.

[1] https://www.edx.org/course/essential-mathematics-for-artific...

So you suggest that I should learn from MOOC then go on and work on some projects so that I can prove I really know it.

Exactly. And to take it one step further, choose one industry you are interested in. That way you will gain invaluable domain experience as you add relevant portfolio projects.

If you don't have an industry in mind, you can use a site like glassdoor.com and search for data scientist positions by city and industry to get a feel for demand.

Full disclosure: I'm in the industry for 10+ years as a programmer. I just realized that if I want to move in the AI direction I'll need some math education. I don't want to become a data scientist.

You could work thru one of the ML in R/python books e.g. Géron or Raschka/Mirjalili and then dig into the lin alg, prob, stats, calculus/analysis you see there with the books everybody recommends, LA by Axler, Strang or Proabilty by Bertsekas /Tsitsiklis, Real Analysis by Pugh, Abbott, Strichartz etc

Reply on news.ycombinator.com