- My advice to an aspiring data scientist is to be curious,
extremely argumentative,
judgmental.
Curiosity is absolutely must.
If you're not curious,
you would not know what to do with the data.
Judgmental because if you do not have
preconceived notions about things,
you wouldn't know where to begin.
Argumentative because if you can argue
then you can plead a case,
at least you can start somewhere.
And then you learn from data
and then you modify your assumptions and hypothesis,
and your data would help you learn.
And you may start at the wrong point,
you may say that I thought I believed this
but now with data I know this,
so this allows you a learning process.
So curiosity, being able to take a position,
strong position, and then moving forward with it.
The other thing that a data scientist would need is
some comfort and flexibility with analytics platforms.
Some software, some computing platform but that's secondary.
The most important thing is curiosity
and the ability to take positions.
Once you have done that,
once you've analyzed, then you've got some answers.
And that's the last thing that a data scientist needs
and that is the ability to tell a story.
That once you have your analytics,
once you have your tabulations,
now you should be able to tell a great story from it.
Because if you don't tell a great story from it,
your findings will remain hidden,
it will remain buried, nobody would know,
but your rise to prominence is pretty much relying on your
ability to tell great stories.
A starting point would be to see
what is your competitive advantage?
Do you want to be a data scientist in any field
or a specific field because
let's say you want to be a data scientist and work for an
IT firm or a web-based or internet-based firm.
Then you need a different set of skills.
And if you want to be a data scientist for
let's say in the health industry,
then you need different sets of skills.
So figure out first what your interest is
and what is your competitive advantage.
Your competitive advantage is not
necessarily going to be your analytical skills.
Your competitive advantage is your understanding of
some aspect of life where you exceed
beyond others in understanding that.
Maybe it's film, maybe it's retail,
maybe it's health, maybe it's computers.
Once you have figured out where your expertise lies,
then you start acquiring analytical skills,
what platforms to learn.
And those platforms, those tools would be specific to the
industry that you're interested in.
And then once you have got some proficiency in the tools,
the next thing would be to apply your skills to
real problems and then tell rest of the world
what you can do with it.