Reflecting on the Meetups

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For my previous module, I primarily attended the meetups organized by Women in Data Science and the events organized by Galvanize. For this module, I found a group which specialized in NLP called the  Austin Natural Language Processing group. I saw an upcoming event which I was very excited about, which was supposed to talk about generating text using deep learning. It did ask for an entry fee, but I thought it will be worth it because the event details showed a very interesting list of topics. But so far they have already postponed the even twice with no information on when will it happen next. Thus after this, I was in fix as to what meetup to attend.

So I diversified my search and ended up signing up for PyLadies ATX  and Learn to Code - Thinkful Austin. To my surprise, I found that PyLadies host a Whiteboard Mock Interview meetup!

When I did the first module, I did know what meetup to attend for it, this would have been perfect. I thoroughly enjoyed the session. I was mostly a silent observer for this first one but I intend to come back here again and participate more. This was an interesting experience because they took real interview questions and discussed how to solve them on the whiteboard. Also, these weren't the basic write a linked list type questions but the more challenging ones, such as design a card game or design a tic-tac-toe game. One of the questions was also how will improve the traffic problem in Austin. I sat there bewildered that it is not a technical question and how could one solve this on a whiteboard? The way the speaker solved that problem, took me back to the Harvard Business School videos I watched for my first module, where they were describing socio-economic problems on a whiteboard. The speaker elegantly kept describing what are the out-of-box ways that could be used, would describe a sub-topic then make a not of it on one side of the board, and re-use the space for describing the next sub-topic. I did not know that there was sometimes an interview round called out-of-the-box thinking or design thinking round where questions like these could be asked. 

This was a really informative meetup and I intend to attend this again. 

I had planned on mentioning this to Professor Howison this week and how it all came full circle but unfortunately, the class was cancelled, so I spent my Wednesday working on the rest of NLTK codes in my jammies, with hot cocoa!  

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