What Does a Data Scientist Do?

Hi, I'm Katherine, I'm a data
scientist at Codecademy.

My job at code Academy is to analyze our learners and see what courses people are taking 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 zeal it's a little bit of statistics skills and a little bit of knowledge about your business and I think this side the piece of that that's actually most critical is the business side of it we're in the organization do you fit into so 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 and there have been doing teams it's kind of sitting separately from likes of 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 like machine learning or artificial intelligence and there is so many sub that's 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 cor 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 because between each other like 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.