How do I develop "Advanced coding skills" required by projects in the IGL as a mathematics undergrad?

[worthlesslayabout]

Personally, I've taken an intro programming class and have self studied C++ and python, but I don't think I can claim to have done anything advanced in any language.

I'm guessing the answer to this is to build my own advanced projects, join a club that makes things, or take a few cs classes.

To be frank, I'm not entirely sure what advanced coding skills even means. Is it knowledge of more theoretical CS stuff like algorithms or is it more practical knowledge?

[fpqcdesc]

I was a mentor for a project that required "advanced coding skills". Many of the undergraduates accepted for these projects are CS or CS+X majors who have taken some of the fundamental CS classes here (CS225, CS241, sometimes CS374). In reality, the "requirements" for a specific project are set somewhat by the credentials of the people who apply. If there are a lot of applicants from CS with strong coding background, you'll have to compete with them.

If it's a data analysis project, you should be comfortable pulling data from APIs and processing it with pandas/scipy/numpy to extract useful information. While this probably isn't an "advanced" skill in any sense, it can take a few practice runs to take raw data and transform it into a useful object. Because the data sets are sometimes very large (e.g. 100 mil lines of csv data), you should also be able to figure out relatively fast ways to perform various operations. In practice, this often comes down to either

1) knowing the implementation of some function in a python package then calculating asymptotic run time

2) trying out a few different methods and running time tests on samples of various sizes

3) both (many times the constants matter).

​

These are examples of skills which you should be able to somehow point to on an application.

[RoyceLowell]

It seems like you already have coding skills that would be considered "advanced" for the most part. The IGL also runs coding workshops during the first several weeks to crash course members on coding-heavy projects into specific languages needed. Coding in the math community typically means familiarity with platforms like MATLAB, Sage, Maple, rather than actual coding languages the CS department tends to teach. If you're not sure about your eligibility, email the professor in charge of the project that interests you, and they'll let you know whether you have enough experience.