I'm not exactly a newbie, but I messed up pretty bad and my experience with Linux is not yet at a level where I know how to recover aforementioned deleted folder.

Essentially while in my UNIX course, I was doing the end of chapter questions and testing my work by running the commands on my own virtual server, rather than the one provided by the college (Which is my bad)

So I ran the following
As you can clearly see, I derped up and deleted the home folder and the backup folder.. Any suggestions on how to recover my data?

There's no easy, bullet-proof way. When you're using rm to delete files rather than a file manager, it's tacitly assumed you know what you're doing / you're happy shooting yourself in the foot / you have a backup.

A search like https://www.google.com/search?q=how+...eleted+with+rm will have various answers, which are mostly along the lines of "not really, no". You can, however, try tools like photorec or Magic Rescue, but I don't anticipate you having much luck... Sorry! (Edit: here's a bigger list of programmes to try)

The lesson I hope you've learnt is to make backups, and put them in places where you won't accidentally delete them... (I mount my backup drive on /media/backup)