Top Data Science Career Questions, Answered | by Haden Pelletier

I’ve been a data scientist for over 3 years. This is what most people want to know about the field.

Most people are both impressed and confused when I tell them I’m a data scientist.

Impressed because it’s considered such a fancy and prestigious title nowadays (though some will still call us statisticians who can code).

Confused because … what does data science mean, really? And what do we do?

Well, it depends.

On the domain, the company, and the team itself.

But in general, data science encompasses the following categories of work:

Databases and data engineering — Many data scientists work closely with databases, whether that’s loading and querying large amounts of data, building data pipelines, or cleaning and preparing data for analysis. At my last company, I used SQL regularly to access our database in order to query data needed to build ML models. I also found myself creating and altering tables in order to store results from models and other analyses.
Data analytics and visualization — Data visualization involves not only analyzing the data but…