The Data Incubator: Find Top Courses & Training Locations

With its fellowships for academics with analytic backgrounds, The Data Incubator aims to bridge the gap between untrained talent and industry jobs in the rapidly expanding field of data science. Michael Li, Ph.D. founded the school in New York City in 2014. Li is a computer science and mathematics scholar who studied at world-renowned institutions like Princeton and Cambridge and worked at Foursquare and Cornell Tech. He brings extensive experience in both industry and academia as well as public communication, serving as a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, TechCrunch, and Wired. In 2019, Pragmatic Marketing acquired The Data Incubator and rebranded as Pragmatic Institute, offering the school greater resources to expand their data science course offerings. Li remains President of The Data Incubator, adding President of Data Science at Pragmatic Institute to his impressive resume. The Data Incubator’s reach is international, as the school also consults on data science programs in Central Europe, Japan, and Malaysia.

School Locations

The Data Incubator maintains three in-person locations where the school hosts bootcamps quarterly. The main campus is today located in Oakland, California, in the Oakland Impact Hub in the Northgate-Waverly district, five blocks from the 19th St/Oakland BART station. From its Oakland location, the school streams its live online courses.

New York City is home to The Data Incubator’s corporate headquarters and a second campus in Greenwich Village, three blocks from Union Square Park. The Data Incubator’s third location is in Washington DC, across the street from the Dupont Circle Metro Station. All locations feature kitchens available for students’ use.

Subjects Taught at The Data Incubator

The curriculum at The Data Incubator focuses exclusively on data science, including data engineering. By using the Classes Near Me tool from Noble Desktop, future data science students can locate additional classes and bootcamps from a range of data science education providers.

What Classes Are Available?

The Data Incubator runs three different classes: the Data Science Fellowship program, the Data Engineering Fellowship program, and Data Science Essentials. The Data Science Essentials course is a beginner-friendly program for students who have a basic familiarity with programming to upskill with an introduction to Python. Students in this course learn about data transformation and aggregation, data visualization, machine learning, and classification. In the Data Science Fellowship program, students dive deeper into machine learning, data visualization, distributed cloud computing, and neural networks, gaining advanced skills in Python and SQL while also learning about the business applications of data science. For students who want to get their hands under the data science hood, the Data Engineering Fellowship program introduces database management systems, cloud computing, and distributed systems along with machine learning and APIs, giving students experience with algorithms and data structures.

Class Formats

The Data Incubator offers its students both in-person and live online options for their education. The Data Science Essentials program is fully online, running part-time two hours per day, two evenings per week (Eastern Time), with students completing the course in eight weeks. In the Data Science Fellowship, students can choose between studying in-person or online, full-time or part-time, while the Data Engineering Fellowship is offered full-time online. The full-time courses take eight weeks to complete and run on a regular business hour schedule, 9 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday, with students’ choice of an Eastern or Pacific Time schedule. The Data Science Fellowship part-time course is a 20-week program running 7:30 pm to 9:30 pm two weeknights per week (Eastern Time). Fellowship students complete some pre-work along with a pre-work assessment. Students study in small cohorts and work on practical assignments, participating in coding challenges and developing a capstone project for the course’s completion.

Admissions Process

Application to the Data Science Fellowship and Data Engineering Fellowship programs is competitive. Students are required to have an academic background in the analytic sciences or social sciences, and a degree: either a master’s or Ph.D.; a nearly-completed Ph.D.; or a bachelor’s and significant professional experience with data. The process for applying to a Fellowship program starts with completing an online application, which includes information about the applicant’s academic and professional background as well as short essays about their professional interest in the data sciences and their career aspirations. To participate in the Data Science Essentials program, students should have at least some background in programming and statistics, and they need only register online through The Data Incubator’s Eventbrite page.

Pricing & Payment Options

Tuition for the Data Science Essentials program costs $2,895, while the Fellowships cost $10,000. Discounts are available for early registration for all courses at The Data Incubator, and a range of financing options and Income Share Agreements are available for students in the Fellowship programs. The Data Incubator is well-known for offering tuition-free scholarships for its top-performing Fellowship applicants.

Career Support Services

All students in The Data Incubator’s Fellowship programs work with the school’s career coaches to develop their job application materials and interview skills. Students also receive coaching on their capstone projects from the school’s in-house experts before presenting their projects to a group of the school’s hiring partners at the end of the course. The Data Incubator also hosts regular social events for current Fellowship students to network with previous alumni from the school’s Fellowship programs.

Alumni Outcomes

The Data Incubator advertises that 82% of its graduates land jobs within six months of graduation, 97% of its graduates work in industry rather than the academy and that graduates of The Data Incubator earn around $124,000 annually. Alumni of the Fellowship programs now work at major organizations like Capital One, DSW, Freddie Mac, and Twitter Cortex. Prospective students can evaluate the Data Science Fellowship program’s graduation rates and job placement rates for years 2018-2020 in the School Performance Fact Sheet, as the school is regulated by the California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education.

What Do Students Say?

Investigating what previous students have to say about their time in a tech school’s programs is an important part of the decision-making process for prospective students who are researching where to study. Many graduates of The Data Incubator are themselves current or recent graduate students, and their perspective on their education at the school is informed by their academic experience. Some alumni of The Data Incubator programs shared their appreciation for the school’s instructors as well as the construction of the course. One student said, “I loved the curriculum” because he found that it “satisfies most of [the] requirements for an entry-level data scientist position.”

For some graduates, the applied projects were some of the most satisfying aspects of the program. One graduate described the capstone project and “[t]he weekly mini-projects that you need to submit to complete the program” as “a cool independent project to discuss with an interviewer” when it comes time for alumni to hit the job market. Students’ experiences in the program vary; some graduates wished for more contact with staff and expected much more robust career support. As one student put it, however: “Overall, I think the Data Incubator served its purpose in that I learned some new material, improved my résumé to reframe myself as a data scientist, and ultimately found a job through them.” An outcome like that can make it all worthwhile.

Key Takeaways

The Data Incubator offers students with graduate degrees the opportunity to learn how to adapt their data analysis skills to data science and data engineering
Courses are offered in-person and live online, full-time and part-time
The Data Incubator maintains campuses in New York City, Oakland, California, and Washington, DC
The Data Incubator Fellowship program awards full-tuition scholarships to a select number of successful applicants
Fellowship program applicants should have experience with programming and possess a master’s or doctorate in the analytic or social sciences, or a bachelor’s degree and substantial professional experience with data

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The Data Incubator

School Locations

Subjects Taught at The Data Incubator

What Classes Are Available?

Class Formats

Admissions Process

Pricing & Payment Options

Career Support Services

Alumni Outcomes

What Do Students Say?

Key Takeaways

Top Courses at The Data Incubator

Fall Data Science Essentials Program

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Subjects Taught at The Data Incubator

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Map of The Data Incubator Locations