the post writes: "I don't think that combinatorics (guessing the probability of red balls in an urn, cards in a deck, or outcome of a dice roll) is an essential step to understanding general probability theory." which seems kind of absurd because i think counting is essential to probability, statistical inference, statistical mechanics (physics), computer science, and so much more.
This is interesting because it totally mirrors my experience with a similar sort of program. Unfortunately, it seems as though being part of the first cohort in these sort of programs is rarely a good idea.
The other problem is that the quality of the cohort varied wildly - some were brand new to the space while others had a reasonable background. Hard to find the perfect pitch for such a wide cohort.
Personally, I think it might be better to find a good masters in computer science and then take classes from the analytics space as interested.
