Hey friends,

Hope you had a great time with your friends and family during this festive season (Lunar New Year) and got your well-deserved break from work.

Throughout my data science career, one of the most common questions I got asked is this:

My answer to this question has always been the same:

Some people might argue that having capstone projects from the bootcamps they attended, certificates from the online courses they completed, or the Kaggle competitions they participated in, can showcase a strong DS portfolio.

As much as I want to agree with the statement, I can't. All of these projects (capstone projects, certificates and competitions), in my opinion, can only showcase what you've learned, but not what you can actually do — your capabilities. Therefore, they are not enough to showcase a strong DS portfolio.

Personally, there are 2 types of projects I think are important to build a strong DS portfolio:

• Personal projects

• Freelance projects

Since I already shared how to build a DS portfolio by doing personal projects, in today's issue, I'd like to share why you should do freelance projects to build a strong DS portfolio — especially when you're just getting started in data science.

1. You get real-world experience

When you do projects under online courses, bootcamps, or Kaggle competitions, clean data is often given to you. And you can start doing analysis and building dashboards. Easy life.

In reality, getting data itself is already a luxury, let alone clean data. If you're curious why I said getting data is a luxury for data scientists, check out my recent LinkedIn post (or quote below) and see why many others thought about the same (it went viral btw 😂).

By doing freelance projects, you get to learn the full workflow of data science, from understanding the problem statements from your client, defining success metrics and deliverables, getting data required, cleaning and analysing data, building ML models (if needed), visualising data, to generating insights from the data.

In short, freelance projects help you get real-world experience by working with clients to solve their business problems.

Therefore, having 1 freelance project is better than 5 capstone projects from online courses because it can show that you're a problem solver in real life instead of just another student who graduated from online courses.

2. You improve your skills 10x faster

You might not know everything when you get a freelance project, but that's fine. Because you can learn and improve your skills along the way.

In fact, doing freelance projects would speed up your learning to improve your skills 10x faster.

Why?

Because you'll deal with actual clients and deadlines to deliver your projects. Failure to deliver your projects will result in loss of clients and revenue, or even worse, loss of reputation. The stake is higher than other bootcamp projects and competitions.

With the high stake and expectations in freelancing, you'll do whatever it takes to learn and improve your skills to deliver results.

🙊 Fun Fact: I didn't know web scraping when I got my first freelance project

• I still accepted the freelance project as a challenge to learn web scraping with the belief that everything is learnable.

• Within 2 weeks, I learned the fundamentals of web scraping and what was needed to deliver the project.

• I managed to deliver the project ahead of time. What's even better is that I unlocked a new skill within a short period.

If you want to improve your skills linearly, go with the normal path. But if you want to improve your skills exponentially within a short period, do freelance projects. You won't regret it.

Conclusion

By now, I hope I did a good job in convincing you to do freelance projects to build your DS portfolio. If you're still sitting on the fence, no worries - you can always do personal projects to build your DS portfolio.

If you truly want to stand out among the sea of candidates, freelance projects can help you to shine. 🌟

When I got started in data science, it was the freelance projects that got me interviews and job offers. Did I also mention that doing freelance projects also helped me make side income and pay off my student debt faster? Yes - that's another perk of having your side hustles (which I'm still doing today).

👉🏻 By the way, if you want me to also cover how to get freelance DS projects, please reply to this email and let me know what you want me to cover? The more specific the better it is so that I know how I can help you.

If I receive enough requests, I might consider sharing them in my next issue.

Till then, have a great week!

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That's all for today

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope it has helped you in some ways and brought you some peace of mind.

You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.

See you again next week.

- Admond