Hey people, I have an undergrad CS degree Currently working as Technical Support Engineer and gaining no experince in CS field. I’ve taken two machine learning/data science courses in college. Currently taking R basics course provided by HarvardX. I’m planning on going through that entire program. Also working on Python skills and have messed around with beautifulsoup and numpy. Am I on the right track or how can I work towards an entry-level data scientist career? #datascientist #datascience #career
I think, I should warn you about data science. The "data science" term is going away and the role "data scientist" is also going away. So, now data science is more on the SQL, data analytics side with minimal engineering and machine learning involved. What's on the rise is the ML engineer role, which is basically software engineering with ML as "cherries on the top". So, focus on what you want to get into. Are you happy with the analytics side of things ? Then you should get into "data science", but I do not recommend that path. My suggestion would be to learn to code first, then learn algorithms, then learn Machine Learning, there are lots of good courses on ML, which would get you started on the field .
Honestly I’m just trying to level up so dropping “data science” all together and gaining better ML skills sounds like a plan. Any courses/projects you recommend?
Take Tim Roughgarden's Coursera course for algorithms, Andrew NG's ML course is a must do if you haven't done that already. After you are done with that, watch some cs229 Stanford videos. Then, start with deep learning, watch cs231n videos and take Coursera deep learning. That should set you up.
So I’m a “data scientist” and what I observe at least on my team is that ppl under this title are either glorified data analysts with more pay or software engineers with less pay
sad but true
I wouldn't recommend learning R at this point. Python is where it's at, especially with a CS background. Makes it easier to become a MLE or SWE again.
Great! I’ll starting grinding soon.
Most of the data scientist gigs are glorified data analyst jobs. Actual DS stuff is handled by ML engineers these days. Like someone pointed out, with CS you already have leverage. I’d do the following if I was in your shoes: - Practice SQL - Get good with Python and specifically the DS libraries and pandas data manipulations - Find a good Udemy Coursera etc. series on advanced analytics, machine learning, and data science With all of the above you should be in a good position from a knowledge standpoint. Bonus points if you take product related courses and practice product case studies.
With a CS background you are already better off than many others seeking to transition. Focus on completing projects instead of courses (the HarvardX one is not that good either). Wouldn’t bother spending time with R; keep working in Python.
Quit R. Got it. I have one project going where I scrape IMDB for data. I could implement some ML on it and slap it on my resume.