I am currently in between my Sophomore and Junior Year at a Top-15 ranked Mechanical Engineering Program. I currently doing an Internship at a National Lab building new test setups for experiments, and I've realized I don't enjoy hands-on Mechanical Engineering as much as I thought I would. The parts of my job I've liked the most are CFD modeling and the small bits of coding I've done to Interface with the equipment. I've also done some data analytics with python as a personal project over the summer. I feel like It's a waste to give up on Mechanical Engineering after 1 Internship given I've spent 4 semesters on it and still enjoy the coursework, but I would really like to go for a Data Science Internship next summer. The option I am currently leaning towards is sticking with Mechanical Engineering, but using the 6 "Technical Elective" classes that I have to Pursue Data Analytics and Statistics Courses, and potentially get a Masters In Data Science/Statistics. What would you recommend I do? And of course: TC: $42k (Full year equivalent)
Switch to electrical or ECE at least you have wider spectrum there.
There many flavors of data science. If you want to do the interesting stuff you'll have to get graduate degree in math or CS. Else you'll be doing data engineering, SQL queries or BI stuff.
If I wanted to get a Masters In Math or Statistics, what Advanced Math/Stats classes should I take to prepare?
Advanced math is just math beyond calc3 diffeq and linear algebra 1. Take matrix theory, analysis 1, mathematical stats, probability 1 and measure theoretic, real analysis, multivariate analysis, optimization, linear models
Sunk cost fallacy. Kid, I worked at a national lab too for almost 10 years of my career. I quit. Science and engineering is fucked up. Fucked up TC. Fucked up job prospects. Dump your engineering courses and start leetcoding, learning ML/AI. Nobody gives a shit about CFD simulations.
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Your plan sounds pretty reasonable to me. It's not like being a mech eng grad will close any doors. And maybe after taking those electives you will realize it's not exactly what you wanted, who knows?
Any tips about marketing myself for Data Science Positions?
I'm probably not the best person to answer that, but I would definitely suggest practicing programming (especially Python; try doing some of the exercises in leetcode.com), as well as participating on kaggle (before that, you may want to get used to using numpy and tensorflow/keras). That should already put you on a decent state but I'm sure there is more to be done :)