PREPARING FOR THE CUSP MASTER'S DEGREE
To introduce students to the field of Urban Informatics and help prepare for graduate-level studies, NYU CUSP recommends the following preparatory courses. These resources help students learn the skills necessary for a successful academic career, discover resources at CUSP and NYU, and connect with other students.
Urban Computing Skills Lab
To help prepare for the specific types of urban computing and data analysis students will engage in at CUSP, CUSP offers a free online prep course to admitted students. The UCSL is designed to walk students through some urban science analyses and tasks. The prep course can be completed at any pace, and also more than once. Students will be given access to this course after enrolling at CUSP.
External Online Courses
Intro to Data Analysis
- Offered by Udacity
- Approx. 6 weeks
- Beginner level
- Online
- FREE
From Udacity: This course will introduce you to the world of data analysis. You’ll learn how to go through the entire data analysis process, which includes: posing a question; wrangling your data into a format you can use and fixing any problems with it; exploring the data, finding patterns in it, and building your intuition about it; drawing conclusions and/or making predictions; communicating your findings. You’ll also learn how to use the Python libraries NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib to write code that’s cleaner, more concise, and runs faster.
Intro to Descriptive Statistics
- Offered by Udacity
- Approx. 2 months
- Beginner level
- Online
- FREE
From Udacity: Statistics is an important field of math that is used to analyze, interpret, and predict outcomes from data. Descriptive statistics will teach you the basic concepts used to describe data. This is a great beginner course for those interested in Data Science, Economics, Psychology, Machine Learning, Sports analytics and just about any other field.
Intro to Inferential Statistics
- Offered by Udacity
- Approx. 2 months
- Beginner level
- Online
- FREE
From Udacity: Inferential statistics allows us to draw conclusions from data that might not be immediately obvious. This course focuses on enhancing your ability to develop hypotheses and use common tests such as t-tests, ANOVA tests, and regression to validate your claims.
Intro to Machine Learning
- Offered by Udacity
- Approx. 10 weeks
- Intermediate level
- Online
- FREE
From Udacity: Machine learning brings together computer science and statistics to harness that predictive power. It’s a must-have skill for all aspiring data analysts and data scientists, or anyone else who wants to wrestle all that raw data into refined trends and predictions.
This is a class that will teach you the end-to-end process of investigating data through a machine learning lens. It will teach you how to extract and identify useful features that best represent your data, a few of the most important machine learning algorithms, and how to evaluate the performance of your machine learning algorithms.
Data Science A-Z™
- Offered by Udemy
- Approx. 21 hours of content + exercises
- Online
- Price listed on course website
From Udemy: This course will give you a full overview of the Data Science journey. Upon completing this course you will know: how to clean and prepare your data for analysis; how to perform basic visualisation of your data; how to model your data; how to curve-fit your data; and finally, how to present your findings and wow the audience.
In this course you will develop a good understanding of the following tools:
- SQL
- SSIS
- Tableau
- Gretl
Data Science for Business Leaders
- Offered by Udacity
- Approx. 4-8 weeks
- Online (specific enrollment dates)
- Prerequisites listed on course website
- Price listed on course website
From Udacity: This course provides business leaders and managers with strategies and guidelines for how best to solve the human capital, technological, and management challenges of building data science into the business. Students will gain skills in identifying opportunities for data science across many functional areas of the business, as well as learn the tools to prioritize and execute on those opportunities as part of a data science initiative.
Become a Data Product Manager
- Offered by Udacity
- Approx. 3 months
- Online (specific enrollment dates)
- Prerequisites listed on course website
- Price listed on course website
From Udacity: Leverage market data to amplify product development. Learn how to apply data science techniques, data engineering processes, and market experimentation tests to deliver customized product experiences. Begin by leveraging the power of SQL and Tableau to inform product strategy. Then, develop data pipelines and warehousing strategies that prepare data collected from a product for robust analysis. Finally, learn techniques for evaluating the data from live products, including how to design and execute various A/B and multivariate tests to shape the next iteration of a product.
Other Online Resources
Khan Academy
From KA: Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom. We tackle math, science, computing, economics, and more. We focus on skill mastery to help learners establish strong foundations, so there’s no limit to what they can learn next!
Data Camp
From DC: At DataCamp, we believe everyone deserves access to high-quality education and data skill development for a more secure future. As part of our mission to democratize data skills for everyone, we have always provided free, unlimited access to DataCamp for Classrooms for instructors and their students, serving more than 350,000 students around the world. We’ve also partnered with more than 120 nonprofit organizations to give 25,000 free DataCamp subscriptions to communities that need them most.