We're glad that you have decided to take the Mip Go program! This is just the beginning of an exciting journey that will be unique to you.
Our job is to guide and support you along this exciting process of learning and making meaningful contributions.
Maybe your initial motivation to join Mip Go was to solve a problem of your interest that would lead to a startup; perhaps you want to work as a freelancer helping others solve their problems; or maybe you envision yourself working for an analytics consulting firm or a software company. Whatever it is, we're confident that the experience you're going to get from this program will be extremely valuable for your career.
To make meaningful contributions, you will need meaningful skills, not just knowledge.
As you may know, the internet is loaded with great content for everyone wanting to learn analytics. You can read books, take dozens of online courses, get certificates, and claim yourself as a data analytics professional. Yet, you will likely not feel confident enough to solve real-world problems.
As a matter of fact, companies know that most programs, even high-ranked academic programs, and online certificates, don't provide you with the skills and experience you need to solve their industry problems--otherwise, they would not keep asking for 2-3 years of industry experience.
The root cause for this problem is well-understood: academic programs, books, online courses, and alike, lead you to acquire knowledge, but they don't necessarily provide you with what you need to develop skills.
You may have not realized it, but there is a key distinction between knowledge and skills:
- Knowledge that you acquire with the methods listed above is easily forgettable. You have surely experienced this enough in your life. But if you are not convinced, just read about the forgetting curve.
- Developing skills, on the flip side, requires deliberate practice. This means that you need to repeatedly engage in activities that, over time, will lead your knowledge to get transferred to the long-term memory system, only then you can claim yourself an expert in the subject.
To put it in another way, knowledge, like what you are acquiring as you read this, gives you inspiration and directions to follow, but you will not develop any skill until you put your knowledge consistently into practice.
"Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice."
Anton Chekhov
The Mip Go approach is to ensure that you acquire knowledge and act on it on a regular basis. That's why we have designed a unique environment where you can focus on developing the right set of skills with sustainable, deliberate practice, and support.
More specifically, we will encourage you to interchangeably acquire knowledge from internal and external resources and apply it to meaningful projects. To ensure accountability and speeds up the process, we will also get you to interact with and receive exclusive support from people that have extensive academic and industry experience. Finally, to make sure that you develop the right set of skills, these people will show you how to solve real-world problems, whether they are problems from your own projects or from projects that we have been working on.
In some ways, the experience at Mip Go feels a lot like in-job training, but with some key distinctions to enhance the skill development process from a learning perspective:
- You have a lot more flexibility to pick projects that interest you the most.
- You feel much more comfortable making mistakes.
- You get access to purpose-designed training material.
- You get exclusive support from an experienced Mip Mentor.
- You get to deploy your solutions as web applications using our app builder platform Mip Hub.
While you are part of the Mip Go program, besides a ton of experience and the confidence that you will gain to solve real-world problems with advanced analytics, you will keep building a portfolio of solutions that you can showcase to uncover new opportunities (if that's something you want, of course). These will be solutions that can then be deployed as web applications, with standardized documentation and quality control.
Finally, once you become part of the program, you also become part of our community, which you can leverage in many ways. For example:
- Continued self-development: find learning resources and get inspired.
- Job opportunities: find, share, or create job opportunities.
- Technical support: we love solving problems, big and small, and we love helping others to solve their problems too (because that's a great way to learn and make contributions).
- Meaningful connections: meet people that believe in what you believe and that can support you to constantly lean just beyond your comfort zone.
We hope that the above information makes you feel confident and excited. But if you notice any uncomfortable thoughts surrounding your head right now, make sure to reach out to your Mip Mentor. This may be a great opportunity to start strengthening your connections with your Mip Mentor and with the Mip Wise community as a whole.
Next, you will continue to pave your path throughout the content, one step at a time. In each step, just read the instructions and complete the tasks.
Some tasks may be as simple as following a link and reading and short article. Some others might be more involving, such as solving a puzzle or writing some code. There is no test or exams in this program, so no need to memorize anything. Whatever task you complete, complete it for yourself. And if you identify extra steps that would be helpful for you, go ahead and just do it. No need to restrict yourself to what we are proposing. After all, no one knows your interests and motivations better than yourself!
As a piece of advice, don't worry too much about the content. Again, this is not a regular academic program or online certificate. As such, the content may be not organized in the type of logical way that you are used to. Instead, we will expose you to the content in a way that is more aligned with the way humans learn and develop skills. For instance, we will be mixing up theory with practice fairly often (as opposed to "learning" the theory and then practicing) and there may be lots of repetitions (because repetition is the mother of skills).
Keep your mind open, let your curiosity drive you, and have fun!
Click Next when you be ready to continue.