Israel Tech Challenge

**The following expresses my own subjective experiences and takes from my time as a Cyber Security student at ITC and should be taken only as such**

So much of the necessary basics are not taught or merely glanced at: C++, Penetration Testing, SQL, Firewalls, Linux, etc.. We were only prepared for Cyber Research jobs, which in hind sight is insane as Research requires years of experience in programing and Cyber Security jobs. As for other jobs in the field, If you don't have extensive prior experience in programing you will not be able to pass even an entry level job interview.

There are no teaching assistants, almost no one to help or evaluate assignments, and no tests or projects (except one). Moreover the management staff bully the students on a daily basis, making the whole experience very frustrating and toxic.

As for ITC's promises for finding you a  High Tech job: They don't have almost any connections in the Cyber Industry. They will have a hard time finding you a relevant project and their promises for "assistance" in finding you a job consists of telling you to "look for a job and tell us where you sent your CVs" 🤷🏼‍♂️

If you are looking for an entry into the Cyber Security industry, regretfully, look somewhere else.

This course provided to me a lot of invaluable tools to enter the ML/AI job market.

I did the course at age 30. 
Before starting the course, I had around 4 years of experience in the Israeli hi-tech industry in Software related positions (Full-Stack Web/Product in a startup I co-founded and Back-End/Data Engineer in a data-intensive startup).

I felt I lacked the practical and theoretical tools to apprehend the ML market and transition to a Machine Learning / Deep Learning position in the industry.

After considering options to transition and brainstorming with people in the industry / ITC alumni that shared their experience with me, I felt ITC Data Science Fellows track provided me the best value for time / investment to accomplish my goals.

Alternatives I considered were:
- studying online with Coursera, Udacity, Udemy and like
- taking a master's degress in CS / Statistics in a well-known university
- learn on the job slowly and hope to transition at some point to an ML position

Although I believe I could have acquired some of the tools provided by ITC with studying online / learning on the job, to me it felt would take too long to become proficient, and was lacking the significant advantage of being around teachers/mentors that are leading practitioners in the industry, with whom you can interact (ask questions, "best practices"), and a community of peers (that became great friends) that would work together on assignments, brainstorm best ways to solve problems. 
A master's degree was out of scope because it involved too significant an investment of time and was a bit less focused on industry.

Out of the many tools I got from this very intense 5-months experience, the ones I value the most are the numerous workshops organized by ITC partners that are industry leaders such as Outbrain, Taboola, SparkBeyond, Chorus, MobileEye (and much more), that provided opportunities to solve hands-on real-life data science problems (with real-life datasets, and not only toy problems you can find in online tutorials) that involved the whole DS lifecycle: data acquisition, data cleaning / preprocessing, exploratory data analysis, feature engineering, data modelling (with both classical ML models and deep learning models) and data visualization in both NLP, Computer Vision and classical Machine Learning.

On top of the technical tools and frameworks to do proper data science work, the exposure to many companies in the Israeli ecosystem helped me map the options in the industry and understand well the different players in the ecosystem, and what interested me most, and helped refine my job search strategy. 

I am very glad about the personal project we did that allowed me to practice an end-to-end NLP project in the domain of HR analytics, that involved Data Scraping from leading job boards, data cleaning and modeling with Topic Modeling (which is an NLP model), in order to identify clusters of skills relevant for specific job titles.

Last but not least, the part that was maybe the most significant to me was the project we did together with BMW company in the field of Satellite Imagery Analytics, which involved problems in the Computer Vision domain such as Object Detection, Classification and Semantic Segmentation.
The project involved data acquisition / exploration (around 40k instances), modeling and finally presentation of results to BMW Data Science leadership.

The modeling part involved leading Deep Learning frameworks such as Tensorflow Object Detection API, and PyTorch, using cutting-edge techniques such as Faster-RCNN, and SSD + VGG16.

The tools we used for this project (and were covered mostly during the course of the ITC training) are: pandas, scikit-learn, jupyter, matplotlib, Flask, Keras, Tensorflow, Docker, AWS EC2, AWS S3, Nvidia DIGITS framework.

If you feel I threw a lot of buzzwords in this review, and feel a bit lost with all of those, then you probably feel the same I did before taking ITC course. 

I guarantee you that after taking the Fellows program, you will understand each and every one of those, and will know which part are they playing for the different tasks involved with Machine Learning / Deep Learning positions in the industry, and know how to combine them to create value from data. 

I have no doubt I would not have had a chance to reach my current position without the tools and exposure I got to the industry at ITC. 

I am surely glad I got the chance to be part of this significant experience, and would recommend it warmly to anyone considering transitioning to the Data Science industry. 
Thanks to ITC for the amazing initiative, and בהצלחה to you if you are considering entering this exciting journey :)

ITC does a great job of teaching you the actual skills you will need to be successful in a web developer role, and they do it with a very relevant real-world ""stack".

Trying to learn web development on your own can be very over-whelming. It's a huge topic, and it moves/advances incredibly quickly. ITC provides you with a curriculum that is actually what you NEED to know to be successful and they do it using technologies that are very popular in the industry. 

On top of that they do a great job preparing you for, and landing you interviews for internships with tech companies in Tel Aviv. This part of the program I thought was equally as important as the classroom learning because getting your foot in the door is often the toughest part of getting into developer roles. 

Overall I found the  experience and support excellent. I was hired by the company that I interned for and have been working there as a Software Engineer ever since.

ITC is the key to enter top high-tech companies.

It brings you first the theory by qualified teachers (Some of them are completely awesome). You may find the content on the web but you cannot compare learning on your own and being stimulated by 50 others students from 25 to 40 with different backgrounds and skills. You practice everything your learn with daily exercices and workshops directed by data scientist from high-tech companies (Taboola, Intel, MobileEye, CheckPoint, and more) and finally placed for a 5 months internship in one those companies.

Either ou are freshly graduated from a technical school ,or with work experience looking for jumping in the machine learning industry in Israel and also wants to meet people from all around the world on your way, ITC is made for you. 

They are always looking for feedbacks and improving each year. For me it was a great experience I highly recommend! 

Hope to see you making Alyah, behatslakha!

The ITC Bootcamp, as intensive as it was, allows any motivated person to obtain complete knowledge of coding and opens the doors to a whole new high-paying job market.

The teachers are very knowledgeable and helpful and take time to ensure you understand the material that is being covered. The curriculum is well designed to teach you everything you need to be a full stack developer. 

There is also an excellent mindset between all students, really friendly, we all helped each other a lot.

After ITC, I was able to build complete websites/webapps with all sorts of functionality, design features, and user interactivity. Now, I am not only confident in web development, but I also got offered a job that surpasses all my expectations.

If you are considering it, just do it. Don’t hesitate, you won’t regret it! It will change your outlook, understanding of web technology, coding and yourself.

Being a student from last Coding Bootcamp’s cohort, I can write an honest review about the program. First of all, I’d like to state that I am a French new immigrant, 30yo, with past experience in marketing and sales, holding a Master Degree in International Business.

I decided to take a leap of faith and start learning to code a few months ago and thanks to ITC’s coding Bootcamp I am now working as an software developer intern in one of the biggest cyber security firms in the world. ITC empowers it’s students with a 3months long program designed to turn people without coding knowledge into full stack developers. The administration team, the teacher and the teacher assistants are always available to answer your technical questions,and they use a large amount of ressources in order to accompany us into successfully find an internship, find a job, and even assist us with bureaucracy! I can’t recommend enough enrolling to ITC if you are motivated in learning how to code.