Chapter 20. Concluding Thoughts
Congratulations! You’ve made it! If you have worked through all of the notebooks to this point, you have joined the small, but growing group of people who are able to harness the power of deep learning to solve real problems. You may not feel that way—in fact, you probably don’t. We have seen again and again that students who complete the fast.ai courses dramatically underestimate their effectiveness as deep learning practitioners. We’ve also seen that these people are often underestimated by others with a classic academic background. So if you are to rise above your own expectations and the expectations of others, what you do next, after closing this book, is even more important than what you’ve done to get to this point.
The most important thing is to keep the momentum going. In fact, as you know from your study of optimizers, momentum is something that can build upon itself! So think about what you can do now to maintain and accelerate your deep learning journey. Figure 20-1 can give you a few ideas.
Figure 20-1. What to do next
We’ve talked a lot in this book about the value of writing, whether it be code or prose. But perhaps you haven’t quite written as much as you had hoped so far. That’s OK! Now is a great chance to turn that around. You have a lot to say at this point. Perhaps you have tried some experiments on a dataset that other people ...