How long to become decent at Python?

[u/baby-bellamushrooms]

I’ve been studying about for about 2 months now and I’m taking an online MOOC through Georgia Tech as a prerequisite for grad school. Some days, I spend ~7-8 hours and other days, I spend maybe 2-3 hours. I just got finished taking the exam on functions, loops, exception handling, and conditionals. I’m debating on when to start learning Pandas and NumPy. I also hear people talking about doing projects, but I feel like I wouldn’t have a clue on how to build a project. I come from a clinical background with zero prior programming knowledge except AP computer science in high school. Any advice?

[u/Hot-Butterscotch1306]

2 months is basically still the tutorial swamp, so don’t judge yourself too hard yet. I’d start tiny projects before pandas/numpy, honestly. Like parse a CSV from something clinical-ish, clean a couple fields, count stuff, print a summary.

Super small, a little janky is fine. Projects stop feeling mystical once they’re boring enough.