Congratulations on graduating from your program!!! It may not have been easy, but you persevered and have become a data scientist. Next, you will need to prepare to start your job search and continue to develop your talents.
This roadmap will help you chart a course through the next six months as you embark on your journey. It can be hard to know what to do in the unstructured time that follows an intensive program, especially without the regular social contact, routines, or accountability that supported you through it. Now that you are a graduate, it is up to you to establish that structure for yourself. This lesson includes some recommendations for how to structure your time week-to-week and over the coming months.
Think about dividing your time up among tasks in three buckets, roughly in order of priority:
- Career Services Commitment
- Upskilling & Portfolio Development
- Your To-Do List
Career Services has identified a set of required activities to help you land a job. You will need to complete these activities as part of the Career Services Commitment to remain eligible for Flatiron's Money-Back Guarantee. In short, you will need to do the following each week:
- Contact at least eight people at prospective employers
- Post at least one written or video blog post
- Post at least five GitHub contributions to your public profile
Expect to spend about 20 hours each week on these activities - we recommend spending 4 hours per day on them.
Activity: The Weekly Job Search Activity lesson from our Career Prep track provides detail and advice for each requirement - complete that lesson now if you haven't already.
Learning to be a data scientist is a process that never ends. There are more methods and technologies than any one individual can ever learn, and new ones emerge every day. It is up to you to keep developing your skills, both while job hunting and once you've landed your first job.
This roadmap provides guidance about how to continue developing your skills and your portfolio demonstrating these skills. We recommend spending a total of 20 hours per week, or 4 hours per weekday, on upskilling and portfolio development during your job search. This will help keep your skills fresh and build up your self-development habit.
You likely have your own mental list of things you've been wanting to do after graduating, beyond developing your data skills. This could include...
- Building a social media presence
- Reading a book in your field of interest
- Doing some self-care
Refer back to your to-do list when you create your weekly schedule to fill in any open blocks of time, or if you ever find yourself with extra time on your hands. You may find that you only have time for some items on your to-do list, and that is totally OK.
Activity: Write down all of the things you would like to accomplish during this period. Here is a template to help you get started: Post-Graduation To-Do List.
Establishing a weekly routine will help you tremendously in your job search. Your routine will structure your time, remove the need to make new plans each week, and ensure you are completing your required tasks. You can even use your routine strategically to increase your productivity.
Here are our recommendations for your weekly routine:
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Plan to do any things you don't want to do early in the day/week. It will feel good to get these things out of the way early, and can help you avoid anxiety and procrastination. This will enable you to be happier and more productive throughout the week.
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Make rough estimates of how much time you will to spend on each task. This will make sure that you are allocating the time needed for everything you want to accomplish. Your estimates may not end up correct - take it as an opportunity to reflect on how much time you actually want to spend on various tasks and refine your routine in the future.
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If a task will take many hours, divide it into chunks across consecutive days. Dividing it up will make it feel more manageable and will allow you to more easily move around tasks based on your time and interest. You will also be more productive if you make progress on it every day because you will be thinking about it consistently and it will be easier to pick up where you left off.
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Fill in details later. It's great to have time reserved to research your blog post, but you won't know what that research will actually entail until you've decided what topic you want to cover and in what depth.
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Build buffer and breaks into your daily schedule. Unexpected things will come up, so make space to handle them so you don't fall behind: emails, tech problems, chats with friends, etc. Most people also can't work for 9 hours straight - find a pattern of breaks, both long and short, that keeps you energized and engaged.
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Establish boundaries for your work time. Set a firm start and end time for your day so that you can properly disengage, rest, and re-engage. Identify days (probably weekends) when you won't do any job-related work at all. If you feel the urge to do some work task outside your prescribed time, write it down and use it as motivation to get back to work when it's time to.
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Adapt it as you go. You will only learn about how well a routine supports your progress by trying it out and observing the results. If you find that you are unable to complete everything as you planned, don't beat yourself about it. Rather, take it as an opportunity to reflect on what got in your way and make a plan to address it moving forward.
Here is an example of what a weekly routine might look like:
| Time | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Early Morning | Contact 2 employers (1.5 hours) | Contact 2 employers (1.5 hours) | Contact 2 employers (1.5 hours) | Contact 2 employers (1.5 hours) | Do some reading (2 hours) |
| Late Morning | Upskilling / Portfolio (2 hours) | Upskilling / Portfolio (2 hours) | Upskilling / Portfolio (2 hours) | Upskilling / Portfolio (2 hours) | Upskilling / Portfolio (2 hours) |
| Midday | Lunch (1 hour) | Lunch (1 hour) | Lunch (1 hour) | Lunch (1 hour) | Lunch (1 hour) |
| Early Afternoon | Research blog topic (2 hours) | Start writing blog post (2 hours) | Finish blog post (2 hours) | Make 3 commits (2 hours) | Make 3 commits (2 hours) |
| Late Afternoon | Upskilling / Portfolio (2 hours) | Upskilling / Portfolio (2 hours) | Upskilling / Portfolio (2 hours) | Upskilling / Portfolio (2 hours) | Upskilling / Portfolio (2 hours) |
It might feel unnecessary, but putting your routine in a calendar will make you more likely to stick to it. Just like writing something down makes you more likely to remember it, the act of recording it makes it more concrete and makes it feel more like a commitment, rather than just an idea.
Activity: Create a weekly routine and enter it into your calendar of choice. We recommend using Google Calendar, but feel free to use another program. Set up recurring events so activities occur at a regular time without having to copy-and-paste, and you can edit individual occurrences as needed. You can even add reminders to help you avoid forgetting.
To help streamline and focus your work, try to find ways to align your tasks. For instance, the improvements you make to your portfolio when upskilling may count toward your required GitHub commits. Perhaps you've been wanting to read a certain article - use that as a jumping-off point for your next blog post. Or maybe your most recent blog post would be great to share with an employer to get them interested in you. Finding these synergies will help you work more efficiently and produce better results.
Activity: Identify two tasks coming up for you in the next week that could be made to align, and note this alignment in the events in your calendar. Alternatively, identify one To-Do List item that would align well with the tasks you've already scheduled, and add time to do it to your schedule next week.
By establishing a routine and consistently completing many small tasks, you will build an impressive professional network, blog, GitHub profile, and data science portfolio. The calendar below shows how maintaining your routine, meeting your commitments, and continuing to upskill and improve your portfolio will accumulate month-over-month. It also lays out the upskilling and portfolio development that will enable you to land a job in the next six months.
| Month | Employer Contacts | Blog Posts | GitHub Commits | Upskilling & Portfolio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month #1 | 32+ contacts made | 4+ blogs posted | 20+ GitHub commits pushed | Data Science Post-Work Track complete |
| Month #2 | 64+ contacts made | 8+ blogs posted | 40+ GitHub commits pushed | Polish remaining projects from Mods 1-4, Begin new project search |
| Month #3 | 96+ contacts made | 12+ blogs posted | 60+ GitHub commits pushed | Polish Capstone project, Finish new project search |
| Month #4 | 128+ contacts made | 16+ blogs posted | 80+ GitHub commits pushed | Work on new project |
| Month #5 | 160+ contacts made | 20+ blogs posted | 100+ GitHub commits pushed | Work on new project |
| Month #6 | 192+ contacts made | 24+ blogs posted | 120+ GitHub commits pushed | Work on new project |
This section provides guidance for how to pursue your own professional development of the next six months. We recommend completing these tasks in the order and timeframe described above.
This upskilling track will help you continue to develop your Data Science skills and portfolio over the next month and build your foundation for future development. The track focuses on the following topics:
- Polishing your GitHub projects
- Building a personal website
- SQL
- Tableau
- R
This content is designed to take about 20 hours per week for 4 weeks, but your mileage may vary. It may take you more or less time to complete this, based on your comfort with the material and on your ability to work on it consistently. If you find that you have not completed it by the end of the month, that is totally OK - continue to work on it until you are able to finish.
Activity: The Post-Graduation Upskilling Overview lesson in this track provides more detail about the scope and sequence of this content - complete this lesson now, if you haven't already.
Once you've completed the Post-Graduation Upskilling Track, you will be well-equipped to polish your projects from your course. In that track, you will polish one module project - we recommend that you proceed to polish the rest of your module projects, followed by your Capstone project.
Activity: For each of the projects you completed during the program, do the following:
- Reorganize Your Repo
- Improve Your Presentation
- Use skills from this track (if appropriate):
As you make progress polishing up all your existing projects, you will probably be eager to tackle a new one. The sooner you start thinking about starting a new project, the better. We recommend that you focus on one new project at a time, but you might be able to work on two new projects simultaneously depending on the project scope, your comfort with multi-tasking, and your availability.
Activity: The How to Start a New DS Project lesson in this track provides more detail about how to approach choosing and tackling a new project - complete this lesson once you've finished the rest of the content in this track.
You have shown that you can develop your skills by graduating from the Data Science program - now you must learn to do so without the structure. The key to this will be for you to develop the habits you will need to continually work towards your goals. We have provided here a roadmap of the work to be done and the routines that will support it. We wish you the best with implementing them!