Me learning new things at my desk. For legal reasons: I own the rights to this photo.

Learning data science can be challenging at times. It’s very possible to get sucked into the bottomless rabbit hole of things to learn and feel defeated when you make little to no progress. That’s why it’s good to have a conscious approach to learning new concepts.

Throughout my education and professional life, I had to deal with situations where I needed to quickly pick up a new skill or learn a new concept. This helped me come up with a system which I still use today. Lately, I have been working on learning about a pre-trained NLP model called BERT. Thanks to this experience, I was able to observe myself and see the path I follow to learn things.

Here is my learning approach when learning new concepts, ideas, solutions.

Collect a list of pre-requisites

One of the biggest problems of learning a new concept is that many times you don’t know what you don’t know. In return it makes the learning task feel impossible and daunting. I’ve found that completely throwing myself at this problem makes the task seem easier. It’s sort of like exposure therapy.

First thing I do is assess the situation. How much information am I missing?

To figure this out I find resources and content that talks about the specific thing I’m trying to learn. These could be articles, videos, lectures on YouTube… Anything goes.

I do a first-pass over them to see which parts I don’t understand and what techniques they talk about that I don’t know about. I just note down everything that doesn’t make sense to me. At this point, my goal is not to learn the concept yet. I just want to get the lay of the land around this new concept. The notes I take will either include or point me to the pre-requisites of learning this concept.

This is a crucial step because even though there are great “beginner’s”, “for dummies” sort of content out there, it’s not uncommon for them to assume some sort of basic knowledge on the topic. By having a list of pre-requisites you will have more control of the situation.