Published in · 4 min read · Mar 26, 2022
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First and foremost, this is a very opinionated article in which I will reference my personal experiences from my short career drift towards Data Science.
Nowadays, Data Science is getting a lot of attention because of various reasons. Such as it being announced to be the “Sexiest Job of the 21st Century” or just because of the broad misconception that AI and data-driven technologies will become predominant and take away lots of jobs due too automation. Or maybe just because of the great pay.
But as always, do not just follow the hype blindly as I did and avoid my mistakes.
Data Science might not be your cup of tea
It takes very unique skills and interests to be a Data Scientist which not everybody has. Obviously you need to enjoy Math and Statistics, because these are the foundations of any good data analysis. You need to have those technical skills, but also excellent social skills because as a Data Scientist you will have to communicate your results to stakeholders.
Need to know Skills:
- Math
- Statistics
- Basic Programming Knowledge (Python, R)
- Communication & Presenting Skills
As a Data Scientist, you will often find yourself doing research and investigating why X happened, or how to achieve Y. That is why you should be a person that prefers to do investigative work over implementing a solution to certain problems.
Data Science can be boring
The fun part of Data Science (for me) is building Machine Learning models to predict something. Those algorithms are extremely fascinating and take a very different approach to solving problems than traditional programming.
But building those models is only 10% of the work a Data Scientist is doing. The main part is wrangling and normalizing the data that has to be fed into those models. Wrangling, normalizing, transforming and aggregating data means that it is likely that you write a lot of SQL queries or something similar and execute query after query. Since most of the time the amount of data is pretty big, the queries will take a long time to run.
