How I found the right path

Let's go back to a year ago when I was graduating (majored in Engineering, not CS) and was thinking of starting a new career. "Data Science" (DS) was known as the "sexiest" job of the 21st century, and obviously everyone was into it (still is). Of course, I also wanted to get into such a hot field and was interested in Top Tech Companies as well (who isn't, right?).

I started with Google search and Glassdoor, went through a couple of sample interview questions and it was then when I totally doubted if my skillset was enough to become a Data Scientist. I needed to learn/brush-up-on A LOT of things, I had no idea where to start; I just knew what I wanted — to secure a Data Science job at a software company.

There were thousands of resources, tutorials and courses available online. I just jumped in without any guidance and started checking the resources I could find one by one. The required skills for DS ranged from basic Math, Stats and Programming to advanced Machine Learning, Database Management and Hadoop and Visualization. The word-cloud below well describes what a complete mess my mind was, looking through the online resources! (By the way, "word-cloud" is a visualization representation of the text data. We'll see more of that when we get into Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is a very hot branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Science). YAY! I am so excited to get this going, get ON BOARD!

You get a sense of the situation I was in. Now, if you have not read my Self-Taught DS recipe yet please do so, otherwise continue reading.

At this point, you already know that there are actually at least four different roles within a Data Science job posting:

1. BI Analyst: focused on visualization, A/B testing (mainly for digital marketing).

2. Data engineer: focused on ETL processing and coding.

3. ML Engineer: focused on Machine Learning, Stats and coding.

4. Data Scientist! Theoretically it is a combination of everything! Practically it does not exist!

Unique candidate

Did you know that independent of your major, there is a Data Scientist role for which you are a unique qualified candidate? Yes, you are!

My next post will be covering: how to become a unique qualified candidate any employer is looking for! Stay tuneeeeed!

Good Luck Data Scientists to be!