First, let's do the numbers thing. I've racked up something like 25 course certificates in just about a year. Of these, 7 are verified. If we break them down by general topic, we have:
- statistics / data science: 9
- biology / medicine / life sciences: 7
- computer science / programming: 5
- astrophysics: 2
- economics: 2
(Of course, the categories are somewhat arbitrary: much of the data science thing could be classified as computer science; Introduction to Bioinformatics counts as CS but Quantitative Biology − which was about using Python and Matlab and R to analyse biological data − counts as biology. So don't take the count as an absolute, more as an indication of where I'm going.)
I'm currently embarked (with paid certificates and all) in two Coursera specializations: the Johns Hopkins Data Science one (which I'm halfway through already) and the Mount Sinai Systems Biology one (which I'm only three weeks into, out of about a year, all told). I guess I'll blog some more about these; generally speaking I'm finding the Data Science one pretty good once one gets to the meat of it (the introductory courses about R are… introductory, but the projects are okay; the more mathematical "statistical inference" course is quite good) and while Systems Biology course has a very tough start, it gets easier once we've hit stride. It's quite advanced, which is what I'm looking for, and that's pretty satisfactory.
Anyway, I'm currently enrolled in the following courses:
- Systems Biology
- Introductory Human Physiology (a great backgrounder for sys.bio.)
- Data analysis and statistical inference (to keep doing stats, but I'm really auditing only)
- Dinosaur paleobiology
- Fundamentals of Neuroscience part 2: Neurons and Networks
And the future brings the following:
- Immunology part 2
- Astrophysics part 3: the violent universe
- Anatomy
- Neural data analysis
- Another 4 modules of Data Science (out of 9)
- Another 4 modules of Systems Biology (out of 5)
