Our 4th week has come to and end and with it a lot has happened. I have a lot to tell you guys so in order not to be too long and to be able to tell you about the subjects and projects I will be brief and summarize what I have been doing these days.

To begin with, I managed to move to a new apartment shared with another partner of the program and I'm thrilled as I have managed to reduce expenses considerably. We are both working on a project that we hope will work out and of which I will tell you about later. I will give you a hint though: it has to do with the Spanish entrepreneur ecosystem!

During this week I had the opportunity to visit Skydeck, the incubator of UC Berkeley. To put it in one sentence: it was Incredible! I posted a couple of photos of the views from the penthouse ... but it is not about the views when I say it was incredible. I was able to check the amount of resources available to startups such as contacts with top companies in any kind of field you can think of, one of the top law firms to help out with anything they need..and that is just the top of the iceberg. This is by no means a synonym of success for your startup, but its close. One thing that I've also noticed here, is that if you have the contacts, the path to becoming a successful entrepreneurs gets a lot easier.

A friend of mine and I were able to attend a very interesting keynote event held by Deloitte . To give you an idea of ​​how things work here, two months before opening the application dates for their internships and job offers to the rest of the world, they swing by UCBerkeley and Stanford and allow students and recruiters to connect and give students an overview of what they will be working on once they are selected. Basically what they do is, they give them priority over the rest of students. Is it fair? I do not know, but I'm going to take advantage of it :).

Back to University.... things are starting to speed up. Coming from the Spanish system where students are more focused on passing the exam and there are very few lab hours, therefore, very little time to apply what we actually learn, it is difficult to adapt to the amount of tasks (or homework as they call here, which I find funny because it is a word I haven't used since elementary school) and projects that they give us. Anyhow...I am becoming accustomed and it is becoming easier to attend and participate in all the activities offered by this great university.

Once again it is at this point where you realize the difference with the Spanish system and the american one. As you know, I'm taking technical courses such as Blockchain, Machine Learning, Applied Data science... and in each of them we had to form teams of 4 or 5 students with whom we will work during the next 4 months in a project that we will have to present at the end.

Most of these projects are ideas that students come up with in class, but many others are presented by startups and companies such as Lyft, Salesforce, Kiwi, Lime, Airbnb ...) that come to the classrooms to present them and look for students interested in working with them to develop it. Out of all the projects students will work on during the semester, nearly 20% become a startup, something that, when I heard about it, left me speechless. Now I understand why there are 20-year-old kids with a startup in 2nd career !! This actually means that from the moment you become a freshmen, you are working in a team (or for a company) to develop a possible product ... and this happens in most of your courses. Therefore, a Berkeley graduate would have work in at least twenty projects during his university career and worked for five or six different companies like Lyft, Stripe, Lime and a long etc applying in each one of them whatever he learnt in class, providing him/her with a lot of experience for when they finally graduate and start working for a company or even developing their startup.

Before telling you about the courses, there is something I really want to tell you guys... I have been accepted in this course where we will have keynote speakers such as Evan Spiegel (Snapchat), Matthew Prince (Cloudfare), Nagraj Kashyap (Microsoft Venture) and of course, we will present our projects to them during the final stage of the semester.

Now, going back to the courses and projects I am going to work on, I am already part of a team of five people in the subjects of Blockchain and Applied Data Science and I am waiting for the teams to be formalized for the Newton Series Lectures project where we will develop a mobile application for a company (yet to be defined).

In the subject of applied data science, which we call Data-x, we have already started working with GitHub, Jupyter and its famous notebooks (a very powerful and interesting tool that allows you to write documents with code visualization in real time) Anaconda ... We are progressing at a huge pace. We are working with Python and we have devoted these two weeks to familiarize ourselves with several of its libraries (numpy, scipy ...) which we will continuously use when it comes to modeling and dealing with data. Within a week or two we will start working with Tensorflow, I am eager to start working with this tool that I have heard so much about. Although in the section of my blog dedicated to Data-x I will go into more detail, the book that we will work with during this semester is "Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn & Tensorflow", for anyone who is interested.

Regarding Blockchain, due to Labor Day we only had one lecture so far, but it was enough to see the potential of this new technology and its infinite applications. As an anecdote, and so that you understand a little more why the USA is who it is when it comes to opportunities and entrepreneurship, the professor giving the lectures is the VP of Oracle Luke Kowalski.

Next time, I'll tell you about how he ended up dedicating himself to the technology sector as an architect. Going back to blockchain, during the first class we had a presentation by Alexander Fred Ojala who introduced us to this new technology. You can find more about this presentation in the blockchain section that I created in this blog. For anyone interested in the subject, the book we have to read is called "The truth machine-The blockchain and the future of everything". As for the team and the project, I will let you guys know in the following post :)

See you next week