Insight community grows in Silicon Valley and expands to New York City

This past summer has been a busy one at Insight. We grew the Insight Data Science Fellows Program in Silicon Valley, piloted our new Data Engineering Program, and also launched the inaugural New York session — all of which were overwhelming successes.

At the beginning of the summer, we moved to a larger office in the heart of Palo Alto, CA to kick off our June 2014 session. As usual we had a diverse group of Insight Data Science Fellows participating from a variety of fields including computational biology, physics, and the social sciences. Every day, data teams based in Silicon Valley came to talk about the opportunities at their companies as well as share best practices. Many of the data scientists now coming to speak at Insight are themselves alumni of the program. The companies who hired Insight Fellows from the June 2014 session include Facebook, Square, Yelp, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Intuit, and many others. In addition, we are seeing a growing trend of Fellows joining high-growth startups such as Stitch Fix, Lumiata, Pebble, and Hampton Creek, to name a few.

With over 150 Insight Fellows now working as data scientists and data engineers, we keep hearing amazing stories of alumni success. Many early Insight alumni are now themselves leading data teams at their companies. In addition, there is a powerful amount of knowledge exchange that happens within the Insight network, with alumni discussing technical best practices over dinner or drinks on a regular basis. Additionally, the success of the Insight Fellows is becoming known beyond the academic and data science communities. The Wall Street Journal recently ran a front page article, entitled Big Data’s High-Priests of Algorithms, which featured a number of Insight Fellows and mentors, and described some of our efforts to help academics make the transition to industry.

Building upon our two years of running the program in Silicon Valley, we kicked off our inaugural session of the Insight Data Science Fellows Program in New York City in August. It was the first time we ran a session on the east coast, yet we received an incredible response from PhDs and postdocs who had heard of Insight but wanted to become full-time data scientists in the New York or Boston areas. From day one of the session, it was apparent that the excitement and community aspect of Insight was present amongst the NYC Fellows.

Data scientists from the New York tech community came out in full force to meet the group. The diversity of industries starting to leverage data was clearly on display amongst the companies visiting and hiring from Insight NYC:

• Tech: Facebook, Palantir, Spotify, Foursquare, Project Florida, Quirky, Greenhouse, etc.
• Healthcare: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, ZocDoc, Oscar Health, etc.
• Media: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, MTV, etc.
• Finance: Capital One Labs, Bloomberg, American Express, etc.
• Advertising: Simulmedia, Sailthru, Tapad, etc.
• Telecom, IT & Consulting: AT&T, Verizon, KPMG, IBM, etc.

Through these visits, Insight Fellows gained a front-row perspective on how data science is being implemented at these various industries and companies. The NYC Fellows are now in the middle of interviews, and they are getting offers at an impressive rate.

Even more recently, we kicked off the September session of Insight in Silicon Valley. Fellows from this session have built some incredible projects, even more companies have come in to meet them than the last session, and they will start interviewing in about a week’s time. The Insight Fellows in this session have worked on some very exciting new projects and are pushing the boundaries of what we thought was possible to accomplish during a short program like Insight.

Meanwhile, applications are now open for the January 2015 sessions of the Silicon Valley and New York programs. The application deadline for the Data Science Program is Sunday, October 12, while the Data Engineering Program deadline is Monday, October 27. It is going to be extremely exciting to see the next group of Fellows who will continue to shape the Insight and the broader data science community.

Interested in transitioning to career in data science?
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