

Ask HN: Getting into Data Science/Stat/Marketing? - argonaut

I have a friend in college who's really really smart - 4.0 GPA and breezes through upper-level math/stat classes as a rising sophomore, but suffers from what a lot of people in college suffer from: not knowing what they want to focus on in college and do after college. He often tells me how anxious this makes him, and how jealous he is that I seem to have already made up my mind to focus on a CS career (for now). So far I've gotten him to spell out his areas of interest: CS, Stat, Econometrics, Marketing, and Biochemistry. It helps that the first three areas are really interrelated, and he has also expressed interest in the intersection between statistics and marketing. Being in SV and all, I hear a lot of hype about big data and data science, and so I've suggested this as a possible path to explore in the future (this summer he's doing research at a biochem lab and taking an intro CS class - in Java I think).<p>My question: anyone have any tips for how someone might get started in either 1) data science or 2) applying statistics to marketing? (assuming a strong foundation in math, stat, and 1-2 CS classes).
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mikegagnon
I would recommend getting an internship at a startup that already has a strong
statistics marketing group. The best way to learn about industrial jobs is by
trying them out.

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S4M
If he wants to work as a statistician/data scientist, having R on his cv will
help.

