

Graduating (PhD) soon and wanting a lateral move. Where could I fit? - tomrod

I'm coming near the end of a PhD in economics, and looking for advice. I have no desire to teach at a university (that market is over-supplied). My skillset really lies in consulting, coding, mathematical modeling, and statistics. The job market coming from economics graduate school is kind of interesting in that the expectation is a full year will occur before a job is found.<p>I love the tech world, and follow it fastidiously. I want my career to be involved in it, either as an outside researcher/consultant or as a producer.<p>My question is: in your organization, where could you use a person like me? I'm curious as to the opinions of both startup entrepreneurs and mature company managers.<p>Much thanks for the advice! I'm a long-time member of the hacker-news community (even though I don't always have much to say) and I always appreciate the wise words I read on here.
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SkyMarshal
> My skillset really lies in consulting, coding, mathematical modeling, and
> statistics.

Do a job search for keywords 'data', 'data science/tist/, 'big data'.

Cloudera would be a good place to start, founded by Jeff Hammerbacher who
built Facebook's social graph:

<http://www.cloudera.com/company/careers/>

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debacle
It would be incredibly helpful if you had some sort of CV here. Right now, the
answer is potentially anywhere without knowing more information.

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tomrod
Fair point. Here is a link to my cv: <http://tinyurl.com/vitatomrod>

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debacle
It looks pretty well rounded, programmatically speaking, at least for an
mathematics/econ grad.

I wouldn't hire you as a programmer unless I saw some code samples, and IMHO
you probably don't have enough experience with the SDLC to be a good producer,
but you'd probably fit a data analysis role relatively well.

The problem is that data analysis is more and more about managing your data
and making it more accessible, and less and less about the modelling itself.
It's much easier to teach a programmer that knows about big data statistics
than it is to teach someone that knows statistics about big data, in my
experience, but as someone who already has some programming experience you
might pick it up very easily.

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tomrod
Thanks for that debacle.

As I have the "year" to beef up various weak points of my cv, what would you
suggest? Classes or a project that use scientific computing? Learn Hadoop?

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debacle
If you want to work with data, Hadoop might not be a bad idea, but in reality
you run into the experience chicken-egg problem: You're not going to be able
to get access to the datasets you need to get experience with the datasets
that you need experience with until you have experience with large data sets!

I would look for an open source project that has data manipulation needs
(LibreOffice might be a good start) or some free and huge data sources
(National Weather Service has a ton) and see if you can be of assistance
there.

I would also recommend trying to take on some freelance work in mobile or web
programming (low barrier to entry, lots of small projects available). Do some
small projects for your local NPOs for free, or become involved in some way.

Many people will tell you to go the OSS route, but to be honest it can be very
intimidating to contribute to an OSS project, and generally the turnaround is
slow. The github pull request lifecycle is approximately 100 years.

