So you want to be a data scientist: A guide for college grads — from datanami.com by Alex Woodie
Excerpt:
The first piece of advice for budding data scientists is not to get frustrated by the job requirements. No recent college grad can fill is simultaneously a math/statistics genius, an expert in marketing/derivatives /cybersecurity, and a pro Python/Java/R coder. (Hint: That’s why data scientists are called unicorns—because they don’t exist!)
“There are many skills under the umbrella of data science, and we should not expect any one single person to be a master of them all,” says Kirk Borne, a data scientist with Booz Allen Hamilton. “The best solution to the data science talent shortage is a team of data scientists. So I suggest that you become expert in two or more skill areas, but also have a working knowledge of the others.”
According to Borne, you’ll do well by yourself to bone up on core data science skills such as machine learning, information retrieval, statistics, and data and information visualization. You’ll also want to know your way around a databases and data structures and have at least some programming languages under your belt, such as Python, R, SAS, or Spark. Familiarity with graph analysis, natural language processing, and optimization also looks good on your data science resume, as do data modeling and simulation.
“The good news for physics, biology, astronomy, chemistry, and other science students is that they can easily translate their science skills into a data science profession,” he says.