Thinking Data...!!!

A few days ago I met a friend after a long time. During our school days if we wanted to list top five 5 back benches, he would have easily topped the list. And now, he had this completely nerdy look on his face.After a curious interaction, I came to know that he was working as a Data scientist in a well- known organization.

The term was interesting . A data scientist. It was the glamour of that term which made me search about it, and this is what I came up at a very amateur  level . I will deal with these five questions in this blog:

1. What is a data scientist ?

2. Is it just an attractive term for a mediocre job?

3. How is the term scientist associated with the term data ?

4. What are the skills a data scientist needs ?

5. What steps do we need to follow If we want to be Data Scientists ?

A data scientist is the one who finds patterns from a large amount of data, and gives us a meaningful and structured information out of it. Scientist who makes new discoveries,A data scientist is bound to  discover some new information from given data.

A good data scientist visualizes data, creates reports, looks for meaningful patterns, predicts an outcome, and draws a conclusion. He creates his own algorithms to extract data. Someone, who creates anything of his own is a scientist. So, the term "Data Scientist".

To be a data scientist, you need to have a fundamental knowledge of Mathematics ,Statistics ,Computer science and bit of Domain knowledge(this comes under Business Knowledge). You can learn all of these skills, but one fundamental quality you need to posses is "Curiosity". If you are not curious then this field is not for you. This is a very unique skill set and so, there are not many data scientists out there.

There are lot of myths about data scientists as well . Let me also tell you what a data scientist is not.

- Data scientists are not hardcore programmers. They should be good with basic coding techniques and logic and they are good to go.

-  Data scientists are not Business Intelligence analysts. They just may hypothesize what they think important. But, they will use all kind of algorithms to confirm those hypothesis.

These are the basic things about a data scientist. I will keep you posted as I learn many more things during my impeccable journey of being a data scientist.
In my next few blogs, I will try to summarize and write about how to get into data science and the difference between a data analyst and a data scientist.