Data Science as a Career-Know your Maths/Stats

The Key to success as a data scientist is love for MATHS :-) and not love for programming

I see numerous posts everyday on LinkedIn talking about Career in Data Science , Key to cracking a Data Science interview , What skills one should master and the list goes on.

With around 12 + yrs of experience in the area of Analytics Consulting across companies , domains and geographies , interacting with colleagues around the world in the analytics space , my belief that good data scientist need to know there numbers and maths behind those numbers well has strengthened.

Data Science is not about learning SAS, R, Python ....., it's about understanding the statistics and the models behind these codes well.Statistics and Advanced Statistics .....are the stepping stone to a career in analytics.

All the successful (read and highly modest) and TRUE data scientists that I have come across have a strong background in Statistics /Maths and they can see through your numbers.

The second key area to master is the domain that you are working in . Unless and until , you have a deep business understanding of the problem that you are trying to solve , all your models would just remain models rather than being implemented and bring value to business.

Post you have achieved these , go ahead and use any language and you would see how analytics changes the world around you for better.

So for anyone looking at a successful career in data science , there is no shortcut.

Disclaimer - Picture is just illustrative and has no relevance to my post :-)