Data scientist is called the sexiest job of the 21st century for many reasons: high demand, high salary, high job satisfaction, high impact, the list goes on. This job is still new among people and there are some different understandings on what a data scientist actually does. Hence, we can all agree that a data scientist works to utilize data by visualizing it or by building machine learning models.

 

As adapted from Forbes, here are ways you can prepare yourself to be a data scientist:

1. Pick a topic you’re passionate about
Finance, logistics, education, politics, human rights. Start to dig in the interesting topic to be explored. Then, try to find the data sets that you can get insights from.

2. Do the work
Once you get the data sets, explore it! Try to clean the data, graph it, and leverage. Study the outliers of your data, check the distributions, group similar values, look for correlations, and try various clustering or classification algorithms. When you have problems, try to get help from data science communities around you or ask questions to Algoritma trainers.

3. Communicate
Communicate your findings in an efficient way. It could be in a scatter plot, bubble chart, heat-map, word cloud, or in any other appealing visualizations. At the end, you may want to ask your friend for feedback to better understand your skills and limitations.

 

Congrats for being on the right path to becoming a successful data scientist! To be a part of our data science community or to get in touch with Algoritma trainers, you can join the workshops or community meetups held by Algoritma. Hope to see you there!