Start early
Assignments, setup, and project work all reward extra time. Students mentioned this more than anything else.
CSE 5114 student advice
What past students would tell future students.
These notes come from anonymous end-of-course advice and reflection prompts in Data Manipulation and Management at Scale. Names are removed, empty responses are filtered out, answers are separated from one another, and small grammar, spelling, and rendering issues are cleaned up for readability.
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Advice and reflections, stratified by semester.
Loading anonymous student advice.
Semester
Response type
Repeated themes
The consensus is not subtle.
Build, break, debug
The tools make sense faster when students test pipelines, read errors, and try the components themselves.
Use AI carefully
Several students found that limiting AI, or explaining what AI produced, helped the concepts stick.
Think in systems
The course becomes easier when each tool is connected back to the larger data pipeline and its tradeoffs.