Working on the machines with no root access is sometimes annoying, especially if you depend on multiple Python packages and your distro is somehow outdated… You may find Python virtual environment (venv) very useful.
First, you need to create venv directory structure (this is done only once):

mkdir -p ~/src/venv
cd ~/src/venv
virtualenv py27

Then you can open new BASH terminal and activate your venv by:

source ~/src/venv/py27/bin/activate

After that, you can install / upgrade any packages using pip / easy_install (even including PIP ) ie.

pip install --upgrade pip
pip install --upgrade scipy

Insipired by python-guide.