Getting into Data Science

What does it take to become a data scientist? We speak with three people who have become data scientists in the last three years and find out what it takes, in their opinions, to land a data science job and to be prepared for a career in the field.Curtis: We’ve talked a lot in our recent episodes about all the interesting things you can do with data science, and we’ve only talked a little bit recently about what it actually takes to get into the field, which is a topic that a lot of you have reached out to us and asked us to cover in a more thorough way. So today, we’re taking a broader approach on this topic by talking to three data scientists who have become data scientists in the last three years. You’re going to be able to hear all the details of each of their three journeys, how they got started, how they landed their jobs, and what their best advice is for getting into the field, and this will give you a broad view about how to get into data science from three people who have actually done it.Ginette: I’m Ginette.Curtis: And I’m Curtis.Ginette: And you are listening to Data Crunch.Curtis: A podcast about how applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are changing the world.Ginette: A Vault Analytics production.Ginette: Here at Data Crunch we’ve been hard at work developing a technology that allows executives and business leaders to gain insight from their data instantly—simply by talking to the air. We hook up your data to an Alexa device with custom skills built in to understand the questions you have about your business - and give you answers. Figure out sales forecasts, marketing performance, operational compliance, progress on KPIs, and more by just talking to Alexa. We are officially launching the product this week and have room for three initial customers—if you're interested, head over to datacrunchcorp.com/alexa or datacrunchpodcast.com/alexa (both work), and book some time to chat with us. We’ll assess if your company is a good fit, and if so, we look forward to working with you!Tyler Folkman: My name’s Tyler Folkman. I've gotten into data science in kind of a strange route to be honest. I did my undergrad in economics, actually originally thinking to get into computer science, but for some reason, I had this thought that computer science was going to get outsourced; I don't know if that was a thing, but I think people back in the early 2000s were talking about computer science getting outsourced, so I thought about business, which ended up begin economics, which I really liked, and then ended up doing economic consulting, which is, basically in usually large litigation cases, lawyers hire economists to value damages, so for example, when Samsung and Apple were suing each other, I worked on the Samsung side to help value how much they might sue Apple for, for patent infringement, and a lot of that involves statistical analyses, data analytics, econometrics as economists would call it. And I got really interested in just this idea of data being a really powerful tool for making decisions and coming to conclusions, and so I started hearing about machine learning on the Internet, kind of dabbling with Python, which at the time, I was a Windows user, and it was a huge pain to get Python installed, but I kind of got it up and running, played around with things like SciKit learn, read some blogs, and really got into machine learning and found that it was really housed more in the computer science department at that time, and just kind of decided to apply to some computer science departments and was lucky to get in at University of Texas at Austin and do some studies there, join a machine learning lab and got to do some work at Amazon. Really got a really good set of experiences to kind of help me learn how to be both a programmer and a machine learning person, a little bit of statistics, and jumped straight from there over here to Ancestry and was luc...