Complete a Kaggle Competition (Top 25%)
8 weeks · 3 milestones
Enter and submit a Kaggle competition, finishing in the top 25% of participants.
Milestone map
Milestone map
3 milestones
Before competing for placement, work through a Kaggle Getting Started competition (Titanic, House Prices, or Digit Recogniser) entirely from scratch: exploratory data analysis, feature engineering, a baseline model, and a final submission. The goal is not placement — it is to build the mechanical fluency you need to iterate quickly in real competitions, where time spent on setup is time not spent on features.
Proof required
Share the public URL of your Kaggle profile or notebook showing a completed Getting Started competition submission — the submission history must show at least one scored submission, and the notebook or write-up must include your EDA, feature engineering decisions, and final model choice with a brief rationale for why you chose that approach over alternatives.
What gets checked
- Notebook includes EDA with at least 3 observations about the data that informed feature decisions — 'I looked at the data and built a model' is not EDA
- Feature engineering section explains at least one feature created or transformed and the reasoning — a model trained on raw columns without any feature decisions is a missed learning
- Model choice is justified with a comparison to at least one alternative — 'I used Random Forest because it works' is less credible than 'I tried Logistic Regression first; Random Forest improved CV score from 0.78 to 0.83'