

Ask HN: I'm a PhD in logic trying to become a Data Scientist. What should I do? - arespredator

Dear HN,<p>I’m just about to finish a PhD in formal logic for multi-agent systems. I don’t want to stay in academia and I’d like to try a Data Scientist career. My background is in philosophy, and even though I taught some computer science and maths courses, my programming skills are those of a mediocre undergraduate computer science student’s (at best). I know Haskell, Scala and Python a little bit, and I’m learning R. I have never taken part in any serious programming project, though. The biggest program I ever wrote had less than 300 lines of code.<p>So here’s my question to you as a community of experts. What is the best path for me? Should I simply learn Java and do exercises from some textbook one by one, and then study machine learning, hadoop and the like? Should I rather start with SICP and a good algorithms book? Or should I perhaps take a Data Science specialization on Coursera (I’m trying it, but my coding skills are too poor even for their elementary R course)? Something else?<p>Any advice is much appreciated.
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agibsonccc
Disclosure: affiliated with the program[1]:

We offer both a 12 week immersive in data science (with structured curriculum
augmenting a focus on practical data science) and a 6 week project focused
curriculum leading up to a job fair. This is a python focused curriculum
focusing on scikit learn.

Outside of that, I ended up becoming a data scientist and engineer via taking
on consulting projects and working my way up on difficulty. There's a mix of
online materials out there you've already mentioned that work more than well
enough. My only other piece of advice is picking a concentration and becoming
as good as it as you can.

1\. [http://www.zipfianacademy.com/](http://www.zipfianacademy.com/)

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eigenrick
I would join this program.
[http://insightdatascience.com/](http://insightdatascience.com/)

Note, I am not affiliated with the program, I just know that they do exactly
what you're asking, and have produced amazing results.

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chunky1994
I highly recommend the intro to data science course on coursera:
[https://class.coursera.org/datasci-002](https://class.coursera.org/datasci-002)

Even if you have only a little programming experience if you spend a fairly
reasonable amount of time on this you'll come out with a lot of practical
knowledge which will allow you to jump into more advanced courses. (It has a
bit of python, SQL and R).

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rfergie
If you want some simple (maybe!) real world projects to test yourself on then
get in touch using the email in my profile.

I do some work for a charity trying to improve things using data. I have
several smallish, self contained data science projects that fit in the
important but not urgent quadrant.

