Crunching Yelp Data to a Job at Crunchbase: Alumni Spotlight on Newton Le

Newton was a Fellow in our Summer 2016 cohort who landed a job with one of our hiring partners, Crunchbase.

Tell us about your background. How did it set you up to be a great Data Scientist?

I have an electrical engineering and computer science degree from UC Berkeley, which gave me a strong coding foundation. I am also almost done with a PhD in structural engineering at UC Davis, which gave me a lot of experience solving analytical problems computationally.

What do you think you got out of The Data Incubator?

Beyond the miniprojects and learning the data science tools available, The Data Incubator really made me see my potential. Being challenged to do something interesting with data, I came up with a fun idea that I had no idea how to execute, but I pushed myself to learn new tools and produce some useful within a few days. Seeing what others could do every week, I was inspired to add significant improvements to my capstone project and learned a lot each step of the way. Super smart instructors and talented peers really inspired me as well. Everyone had their strengths and I could learn something different from each person. The environment didn’t feel competitive at all and was actually very collaborative. I actually miss coming in every day to work with my pod. Go Team Lannister!

What advice would you give to someone who is applying for The Data Incubator, particularly someone with your background?

Start thinking of problems you can solve with data now. Start learning Python and exploring the wealth of modules available for it. You can install Jupyter notebook on your local machine, which will help you play around with scraping and machine learning. The two months go by really fast, and anything you can do ahead of time will help you tremendously.

What is your favorite thing you learned at The Data Incubator?

HackerRank challenges are fun, and practicing them helped me nail the technical challenges I was given in interviews, impress the interviewers, and land the position. The Data Incubator provided solutions were always clever and elegantly written, which really helped me think of algorithms from different angles. In fact, one of the interviews actually used HackerRank to conduct the interview, so being familiar with the format and interface really helped.

Could you tell us about your Data Incubator Capstone project?

Rate to Plate recommends recipes and restaurants from a user’s ratings of restaurants. It first generates a restaurant’s flavor profile using a TF-IDF analysis of the Yelp review text with focus on key flavor-indicating terms, which I scraped from a pretty comprehensive list of food terms on BBC Food. Using a user’s rating of restaurants, the user’s flavor profile is obtained by aggregating the restaurant flavor profiles weighted by ratings. This profile is then matched with other restaurants and recipes that I scraped from Epicurious. The bulk of the data is from the Yelp academic dataset, which I supplemented by implementing a live-scrape feature on my app.

And lastly, tell us about your new job!

I’ll be working as a data engineer for Crunchbase. From what I understand so far, one of my first tasks will be helping integrate disparate sources of data into one cohesive database.

Learn more about our offerings:

Find out which program is best for you – will it be our Data Science Fellowship, our Data Analytics Program or our Data Science Essentials Course?
Hiring Data Scientists
Corporate data science training

Related Blog Posts

Moving From Mechanical Engineering to Data Science

Moving From Mechanical Engineering to Data Science

Mechanical engineering and data science may appear vastly different on the surface. Mechanical engineers create physical machines, while data scientists deal with abstract concepts like algorithms and machine learning. Nonetheless, transitioning from mechanical engineering to data science is a feasible path, as explained in this blog.

Data Engineering Project

What Does a Data Engineering Project Look Like?

It’s time to talk about the different data engineering projects you might work on as you enter the exciting world of data. You can add these projects to your portfolio and show the best ones to future employers. Remember, the world’s most successful engineers all started where you are now.

open ai

AI Prompt Examples for Data Scientists to Use in 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t going to steal your data scientist job! Instead, AI tools like ChatGPT can automate some of the more mundane tasks in your future career, saving you time and energy. To make life easier, here are some data science prompts to get you started.