What is the ideal way to become a data scientist?

manpreet Best Answer 3 years ago

From my perspective, the "triple threat" of a good data scientist is: programming knowledge statistics knowledge communication skills You obviously have part 1 pretty well handled. You should probably look into learning a programming language that is more useful for exploratory data work, like Python or R. You'll also want some stats background. If you choose to pick up Python, Think Stats (Probability and Statistics for Programmers) is a great way to do this. If you're in school right now, maybe you can add a few stats classes to your curriculum to get the basics under your belt, or enrol in a Coursera course or other MOOC. Finally, I hate to break it to you but Data Scientists have to convey their findings and make them useful to people, and this absolutely is related to "design". Different companies break down the roles differently, so if you never want to have to produce a web app or visualisation you'll need to find some place where that's not part of the job. I would guess the largest companies are the ones where roles are most specialised, but I can't say for sure. Pretty much every data scientist I know has to at least produce presentable plots, and most do much more than that. You may also look into "data engineering" roles. These are typically the people who do programming to implement and scale models that data scientists have developed. These roles are typically more programming/develops heavy and don't require as much deep statistical background or user-facing communication like a data science role does.