What Do Astrophysicists Really Do?

It’s nice when YouTube recommends a tangential video (thank you Machine Learning) that I have not seen, but really want to see. This is how I stumbled across “A day in the life of an Astrophysicist at Oxford University”.

The video is not short; it’s over 18 minutes long despite the fast frames. And while I enjoyed watching Dr. Becky get coffee and check Twitter, I was most fascinated by her computer screen while conducting astronomy research.

I kept catching glimpses of histograms on Dr. Becky’s computer and the layout of Jupyter Notebooks which are used to run Python. Sure enough, Dr. Becky let viewers know that she spends her research time writing Python in Jupyter Notebooks.

Dr. Becky goes on to give aspiring researchers and scientists advice, “Learn how to code,” while warning against the pitfalls of handling big data with spreadsheets.

This day-in-the-life video inspires me tremendously. It reinforces that Berkeley Coding Academy really does teach students the same skills that empower scientists and researchers on a daily basis.

The code that we teach goes well beyond Python. We teach the Python that students need to analyze big data. In particular, we teach the pandas, seaborn, numpy, and sklearn libraries in introductory units on Data Analytics and Machine Learning. We also use Colab Notebooks, which are entirely based on Jupyter Notebooks (the advantage is the online learning environment that Colab Notebooks provide).

Many programs provide introductions to Python, but very few teach code that professional scientists actually use. This video provides reassuring evidence that Berkeley Coding Academy is a great starting point for any students looking to make progress in their dreams of studying the stars.

Corey Wade

Corey is the founder and director of Berkeley Coding Academy. He is the lead author of The Python Workshop, the author of Hands-on Gradient Boosting with XGBoost and scikit-learn, and a regular writer for Towards Data Science.