Why Take Harvard's CS50 as a Mid-Career Spatial Scientist
15 Jun 2025At the beginning of Q2 this year, I decided to pursue formal studies in data science. An online, self-paced course wasn’t motivating enough. I wanted something that has monitored learning and deadlines, with a deeper take of the the subject matter and having guardrails to spur me to finish. I looked around and found the PGDip in Industrial Engineering: Data Science at Stellenbosch University. It has a great delivery mode for working professionals and covers all the essential topics of data science according to the Curriculum.
Why Data Science Now?
Getting to a spatial analysis requires a great deal of data management and cleaning, I have had my share of that through my career. So, as part of my upskilling strategy I have been thinking about and working on :
strengthening my data analysis skills to become a Spatial Data Scientist, aiming to seat myself at the intersection of spatial data analysis and data science.
I self evaluated to check on some personal traits justifying why steer in that direction
-
I love combing through data and I appreciate a good data wrangle. Blogged a series sometime ago.
-
Pushed the boundaries of excel with 1 Million records - If that counts as Big Data.
-
While working with data, my aim has been to get to the spatial component and get cartographic output, giving other data elements scant attention. Now is the time to change that and prod the data more.
-
I have worked with many and large datasets before but, my approach has been largely, brute force, labour intensive and rudimentary. Through data science studies, I can leverage programmatic approaches to data wrangling.
Taking Havard’s CS50
One of the requirements of the PostGrad Diploma is studies in Computer programming. They also recommend, among other courses, taking Harvard’s CS50 to meet this requirement. I choose to take this route even though I have done CT130- Computer Science for Engineers. That was 25 years ago and the focus Language was Pascal. For my undergrad research project I delved in Visual Basic. Over the years though I also have dubbled in C, recently R. Some JavaScript and HTML in a Web Mapping Project. So computer code, I can understand fairly well and I can think programmatically to an extent.
Taking CS50, I aim to:
- Relearn Computer Science concept, bringing structure to the knowledge and skill I have acquired over time as a spatial scientist.
- Get a good grasp of Computer Science Concepts like, picking from memory, pointers in C.
- Have a fresh and solid base for when starting the PGDip studies
Documenting The Journey
I enjoy writing, so I will start a blog series designed to document my experience with Harvard’s CS50. In addition to completing the course and getting a certificate, this chronicle should hopefully also act as evidence/ motivation for use when applying for admission to the PGDip.
With the help of ChatGPT, I settled for a 12 week schedule to complete CS50, giving enough time to the application deadline. October 2025. Tomorrow I start!