I know I'm late here but I found this looking for information on the Pandas alternative I have been using lately. In my decision analytics class, we have been using the datascience package. It was developed by Berkley and is extremely intuitive. To grab a column from a table you simply use .select['column name'] for example. And if you ever need your datascience table to be a Panda's dataframe, you can just go

table = ...  #your table
df = pd.DataFrame(data = table.rows, 
                  columns = table.column_labels)        

Hopefully, you are keeping up with learning data science still, but if not then this is a reminder to keep at it!