Data Science… The career of the future?

As an Industrial Engineer graduate and as a person who currently works in manufacturing, I’ve been compelled to look for a different career path. After working for 4 years in an outdated manufacturing plant, I found myself stuck in the past, trying to optimize outdated machinery and processes which should have been upgraded long ago. A small sign of hope came when a new piece of machinery was purchased by the company’s owners, a fully automated machine filled with state of the art technology such as variable frequency drives, Allen-Bradley PLCs and HDMI, and sensors that can detect all sorts of things. For most engineers, those things seem standard, but for the company I currently work at it’s completely new and revolutionary.

After finally being exposed to some decent piece of technology, I decided that it was time for a change and to pursuit something new, something in the tech field. I started looking for courses on how to program PLCs so I could be able to troubleshoot the new machine, but encountered resistance from upper management. Weeks after being shutdown, I was still seeing ads for PLC programming classes on my social media, and that made me wonder, “How do Instagram and Facebook know that I am interested in classes?”. After doing some research on the topic and discussing it with a coworker, I came across the field of data science.

What is Data Science?

The ads that I was seeing on my social media are known as targeted advertising, a type of recommendation systems that is capable of predicting the future preference of a set of items for a user, and recommend the top items. That system looked at my google search history, determined that I was interested in PLC classes and used that to show me ads of classes. That type of system isn’t just in social media advertising, it’s in Spotify, suggesting what songs the user should listen to next, on Netflix and Youtube, giving video recommendations, and on Google, giving search results. I found the concept fascinating and decided to learn more. Recommendation systems is just a small branch of the data science tree.

For those who do not know, data science is an interdisciplinary field, which incorporates skills from computer science, statistics, information science, mathematics, information visualization, data integration, graphic design, complex systems, communication and business, whose focus is extracting knowledge from data sets and applying the knowledge and actionable insights from data to solve problems in a wide range of application domains. The field encompasses preparing data for analysis, formulating data science problems, analyzing data, developing data-driven solutions, and presenting findings to inform high-level decisions in a broad range of application domains. (Thank you Wikipedia for the definition). It is the root of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, whose concept is that systems can learn from data, identify patterns and make decisions with minimal human intervention. I don’t know about you who is reading this, but for me, it is pretty mind blowing. This technology is responsible for the creation of the first self-driving cars, which uses computer-vision to analyze the cars path and make decisions based on what it ‘sees’.

On todays age, with the help of the internet, there is data about everything and everybody, and it is the job of a data scientist to determine how that data can be used for something. Let me give you some facts:

• Data Scientists and other mathematical science occupations specifically, the growth rate is actually projected at 31%, one of the highest in The United States.
• The potential for quantum computing and data science is huge in the future. Machine Learning can also process the information much faster with its accelerated learning and advanced capabilities.

What about me?

After learning what data science is and its future potential, I decided to enroll into the Flatiron School Data Science program. Flatiron was awarded Best Online Bootcamp for Q1 2020 by Career Karma. I cannot wait to learn the skills to become a data scientist and to work with something that is currently changing how people see and interpret information.

References

Przybyla, M. (2020, December 10). Should You Become a Data Scientist in 2021? | Towards Data Science. Medium. https://towardsdatascience.com/should-you-become-a-data-scientist-in-2021-b15cd7300970

Team, D. (2021, April 2). Bright and Auspicious Future of Data Science — Learn it Before you Regret. DataFlair. https://data-flair.training/blogs/future-of-data-science/

Wikipedia contributors. (2021, March 31). Data science. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_science

IMAGE FROM Advani, V. (2021, March 31). What is Data Science? How Does Data Science Works & What Does a Data Scientist Do? GreatLearning Blog: Free Resources What Matters to Shape Your Career! https://www.mygreatlearning.com/blog/what-is-data-science/