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How to set a Career Path as a Data Science Student?

I switched my major to ‘Data Systems and Engineering’ after the first year. Now I am turning in year 3 in the upcoming semester.

The point is, I have to set my path as a data science student. I am interested in both back-end development and data scientist. I’ve done a summer internship at Vandalsoft as a Back-end developer. It certainly helped me to learn new things and enhance my interest in software development.

Before learning coding in depth, I couldn’t find any difference between data science and software development. Those looked pretty much the same to me.

👩‍💻 What is Data Science? 👨‍💻

  • Collect, process, analyze data and interpret the result
  • Build a model and make a prediction/decision

What skills do we need? 🧐

  • Math/Statistics (highly important), Domain expertise, Coding Skill

What is the difference between Data Scientist VS Data Analyst VS Data Engineer?

  1. Data Scientists
    • Develop, implement, and test hypotheses in order to devise and present data-led solutions for business challenges to key stakeholders.
    • Required Skills: strong technical and mathematical abilities such as machine learning, statistical modelling, and big data, and as well as advanced programming skills.
  2. Data Analysts
    • Gather, review, and analyze data to figure out data-led insights which guide and inform critical business decisions.
    • Find/analyze interesting trends in the data.
    • Create visualizations and dashboards to help the company interpret and make decisions with the data.
    • Required Skills: Communication skills, presentation skills, technical know-how, critical thinking and data visualisation skills.
  3. Data Engineers
    • Construct/maintain architectures (like DB, large-scale processing systems)
    • Required Skills: statistical analysis and modelling, Data warehousing solutions and predictive modelling, machine learning, and data mining.

Added a diagram to show the major roles & differences: image

Reference: https://www.dataquest.io/blog/data-analyst-data-scientist-data-engineer/#t-1618332296007

Any advice and suggestions are welcome and appreciated!