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Becoming a Data Scientist

Mandalena Santiago Yearby
Life Skills EHS
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Taking an idea and turning it in a story telling is an art from early ages of human history. In

modern high tech world story telling has been so important than ever. You may wonder why is

that so ?. Generating insights from data and interpretation of data is the at the core of Data

Science and this is what story tellers do and this is the aspect of Data Science that fascinates me.

Throughout history, human being has tried to interpret the physical phenomenon happening in

surrounding nature. Finding patterns and symmetrical structures in nature was always a goal of

very primitive tribes to Greeks philosophers and to modern science. This was not always solely

meant for survival as you will hear from some evolunationary biologists but it was sometimes

just for the sake of pursuit of knowledge. This lead to huge amount of information that

Human being transformed from generation to generation in the form of stories.

The structural Thinking of human transformed these stories into knowledge and coined new

termed called “Data “which Wikipedia in article “Data” defines as data is a collection of

discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic

units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted. (1)

The ability of computer to mimic human mind and work much faster and efficiently has played

and is playing a tremendous rule in solving big problems of humanity in medicine , business and

other sciences. Andrew ng, a computer scientist and Global leader in AI was quoted on Forbes

“It is difficult to think of a major industry that AI will not transform. This includes healthcare,
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education, transportation, retail, communications, and agriculture. There are surprisingly clear

paths for AI to make a big difference in all of these industries." (2)

Ending this philosophical discussion. As a career, Data Science needs mathematics and

programming as essential skills and I am good at both. Typically Data Scientists take huge data

and devise an analytical algorithm, infer insights from data and make a machine learning model

for predictions. IBM Cloud Learn Hub defines Data Science as “Data Science combines math,

statistics, specialized programming, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence with specific

subject matter expertise to uncover actionable insights hidden in organization’s data”.(3)

Harvard Business Review called Data science the most sexiest job in the 21st century .(4)

A report by the McKinsey Global and Financial Times that by 2018, the United States alone

could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills(5).

There is huge markets for Data Scientists that is why people like me choose it.

From philosophy to market, as a career Data Science is my passion and a living. Better knowing

myself and all these years in education , I think my curious mindset and a challenging jobs

markets are the reasons that pushes me towards data science which carry a potential to solve

mysteries of business and science.

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References

1. "Data." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 23 Oct. 2022, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data.

2. Martin, N. (2019). 13 Best Quotes About The Future Of Artificial Intelligence. Forbes.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolemartin1/2019/06/27/13-greatest-quotes-about-the-
future-of-artificial-intelligence/?sh=1c60e9a73bdf

3. IBM Cloud Foundation (2022). What is Data Science. IBM Coud Learn Hub.
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/data-science-introduction

4. Havenport, Thomas , and Patel, DJ. "Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century." Harvard
Business Review, 1 Oct. 2012. https://hbr.org/2012/10/data-scientist-the-sexiest-job-of-the-
21st-century

5. Chui, Michael , et al. "Big data’s potential for businesses." Financial Times, 13 May 2011.
https://www.ft.com/content/64095dba-7cd5-11e0-994d-00144feabdc0

6. Excel High School. (2022). Life Skills.

https://exceleducation.instructure.com/courses/2574
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