What is it like to be a data scientist?

Data scientist roles & profiles in business organization are pretty much in synch with strategy roles as data scientists play a major role in shaping the future plans & strategies of the organization. Successful data scientists can also take a business consultant role as well (depending on the situation) wherein they extensively travel to different business sites, analyse business data and prescribe prospective solutions as to how businesses can thrive in such regions.

In general, a data scientist role is not a conventional 9-to-5 role wherein the employee is expected to carry out certain ascertained or specific tasks. Rather, the role demands higher levels of curiosity and motivation from the employee to seek for opportunities of improvement, and get a project sanctioned out of it.

The things I usually do during the day are the following:

  • Coding. A lot of coding. I used to work as a java developer, and I can tell that data science involves no less coding than software development
  • Collecting, preparing and cleaning data. That again involves a lot of coding
  • Meetings
  • Taking to colleagues
  • Doing machine learning (some coding here as well)

The items on the list are ordered by how much time I spend doing them. So, building ML models is just a tiny fraction of the typical day.