How to Become a Data Scientist in 6 Months: A Hacker's Approach to Career Planning [Video]

I've been digging around for some good presentations, giving a listen to some videos from PyData London 2016. Out of the videos I watched, I chose this talk by Tetiana Ivanova. This is a good talk for those looking to get into working as a data scientist. Here's a few notes I made while watching the video.

Why did Tetiana hack her career? Well, first off, she was a mathematician, and she wanted to get out of the world of academia and make a change.

More details, including references and links, below the video.

Why does our society support higher education? Tetiana emphasizes a number of things that intertwine in a person's life, such as social pressure, historical changes, prestige, and status signaling, to dictate their career options and provide choices as to their direction. I found this fascinating. I've read, and have routinely noticed, that higher education at an established, well-regarded school is largely about prestige and status signaling — more than the actual education itself. As we see all the time in society, people will gain a position of status and power all too often based on the prestige and status arbitrarily associated with them because they went to this school or that school or some Ivy League fancy pants school.

But to wrap all that up, Tetiana outlines an important detail: "Prestige is exploitable!"

There's also some hard realities Tetiana bullet-points in a slide that I found worthy of note.

• Set a realistic time frame.
• Don't trust yourself with sticking to deadlines.
• Make a study plan.
• Prepare for uncertainty.

I can't draw enough emphasis to this list. There are also two points that I'd like to point out in even more detail.

The first is, "Don't trust yourself with sticking to deadlines." The second is, "prepare for uncertainty." If you expect to meet all your deadlines, you are going to dramatically increase your need to prepare for uncertainty. Because you will simply not meet all of your deadlines. Many of us won't even meet most of our deadlines, let alone all of the deadlines.

Tetiana continues to cover a number of details around willpower, self-management, and self-organization, and includes an insightful take on the topic of nerd networking. Watch the talk; it's a good one and will provide a lot of insight, from a clearly introspective and intelligent individual, into clearing and stepping into a data science — or possibly other — career path!