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