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Hi, I'm Katherine,
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I'm a data scientist at Codecademy.
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My job at Codecademy
is to analyze our learners
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and see what courses people are taking.
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I work with marketing,
engineering, product, curriculum
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to analyze the data that we have.
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Data science is defined
as sort of the intersection
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between statistics, software engineering,
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and domain or business knowledge.
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So you have to have
a little bit of coding skills,
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a little bit of statistics skills,
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and a little bit of knowledge
about your business.
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And I think the site,
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the piece of that that's actually
most critical is the business side of it,
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where in the organization do you fit
into that I think going forward.
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A lot of companies
are trying to figure out
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how to best integrate data people
into their organization
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so that they still have a say over
strategy and decision-making,
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and sort of the implementation
of the analysis that they come up with.
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We haven't honed in on like how
data science or data analysis as a field
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fits into different organizations.
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For a lot of companies is the first time
they're building a data team.
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I think traditionally in the past
when there have been two teams,
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It's kind of sit separately from like
engineering and software side of it,
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and now that's more integrated
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and it just looks very different
from teams in the past.
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I think the data science community
is really collaborative.
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I would say that every time I go to
like a conference or meet up
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I'm always humbled by
how much more I have to learn.
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And I think originally
when I broke into the field
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I felt really overwhelmed
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and I felt a lot of like imposter syndrome
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about having to learn a lot
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like half the time I was just like --
I don't know what's going on,
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but then I realized actually,
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when you work
in data analysis or statistics
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you end up specializing in one part of it.
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So you might specialize
in predictive analysis,
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you might specialize in reporting,
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you might specialize in machine
learning or artificial intelligence
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and there is so many subsets.
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Usually, data scientists,
or statisticians, or data analysts
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will focus on one thing
and get really good at it
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and that will be sort of
the core of their work.
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You meet a lot of interesting
people along the way
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who just know like really random
things about random subjects.
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Like a lot of the people who I meet
at conferences and meetups
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have become my friends.
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And it's really interesting,
cause between each other
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we think we do really different things,
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but from the outside looking in,
someone who doesn't work in the data world
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probably thinks we're
all doing the same thing.