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Stats, wonderful. I deplore math. Your advice is interesting and highlights my major shortcoming. I've heard the idea to "work on a side-project that will impr
by ff0066mote 17y ago
Stats, wonderful. I deplore math. Your advice is interesting and highlights my major shortcoming.
I've heard the idea to "work on a side-project that will impress" your desired future employer many times around the HC site. Is that the entrepreneur speaking, or are you offering that seriously? I have to learn their business backwards-and-forwards before I can independently produce something which NGOs may find universally useful. I guess I have to start small to go this route.
- evgen 17y agoI was never much into math until after I left university and now I am constantly kicking myself for not finding the small little subfields of math that I now find useful and interesting. You can get a long way in stats with a pretty basic understanding of how it all works; a lot of what you might do here is the sort of stuff that you can pull out of intro stats books -- you are not going to be writing the stat anaysis code, you just need to know when and how to apply it. You would probably also be well-served by learning a bit about visualization and how to present quantitative information to a lay audience. Do not aim for a side-project that will be universally useful to all NGOs or even to one NGO, aim for a side-project that someone in a position of authority will think is cool or which can serve some small facet of the organization. Think mashup or something small like a heatmap that shows where most of the volunteers/donors live, etc. Don't solve their big problem as your side-project, solve some small problem that can be used to show them that you are capable of solving the big problem (if they hired you to do that task, for example.)