A few things about me
● Took an undergraduate degree in Information System
○ Graduated from Universitas Multimedia Nusantara, Serpong in 2016
● Worked as (Associate) Data Scientist in Airy Indonesia (June 2016 - Feb 2020)
● Currently a master student at The University of Auckland, New Zealand
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How could I become a
data scientist? Disclaimer
It was not a common
career path for an IS
graduate
Not to mention that
“data scientist” was not
a buzzword yet!
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What I knew back then
● Database systems
● Programming
● (A bit) statistics
● (A bit) data mining
● Data warehousing
● Business intelligence
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How does the daily work of
a data scientist look like?
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Source: R-bloggers
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Source: Analytics India Mag
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Source: Microsoft - TDSP
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More importantly, data scientists transform
data into business values.
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Source: Reddit
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Sample work
Source: Airy ♥ Science -
Medium
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What skills should I prepare?
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Familiar with this venn diagram?
Source: Towards Data Science
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Structured Query Languages
● Window function
● Query optimization
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Programming Familiarity with Linux environment is a plus!
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Data Visualization
What can you tell from these pie charts?
Much better, right?
Source: The Next Web
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Visualization can be misleading
Source: The Next Web
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Data Visualization Tools
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Statistics
If you have to choose a single number to represent the distribution below,
what summary statistic will you choose?
“Average” could refer to different things!
Is it mean, median, or mode?
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We can take wrong decisions without
understanding stats
We need more than technical skills!
Curiosity
Critical thinking
Growth mindset
Communication skill
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Any challenges?
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Data quality!
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Source: Forbes
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People don’t really know what they need.
They ask questions, but not the right one.
Source: reinerbotha.com
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Uncertainties - business evolves quickly!
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Communication
● Explain the statistical and math terms in an interpretable way
● Business people do not really care about the technical stuffs you do!
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What are the career options?
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Industry vs. Academia vs. Freelance
● Research
● Teaching
● Service
● Check upwork.com / freelancer.com
● Make money from data science
competitions
● Be an entrepreneur
○ I’d suggest you have a prior
industry experience
● Data scientist
● Data engineer
● Machine learning
engineer
● Data analyst
● Business intelligence
analyst
● Statistician