What Does a Data Scientist Do?

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 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,
there have been doing teams.

It's kind of sitting 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.