The Data Scientist's Journey with Nic Ryan

Data Crunch

What does it take to become a data scientist? Nic Ryan has been in the field for over a decade and answered thousands of questions from people looking to get into the field. In this episode, he talks about his journey into data science and his experiencing mentoring aspiring data scientists, giving advice to both beginners and seasoned professionals.Nic Ryan: I think there's sometimes a problem in data science education, and what people find interesting is they tend to focus on the algorithms, which as you know from doing data science projects is really just the last little bit. There's tens or even sometimes hundreds of decisions steps that are made until you get to that particular point. Ginette: I’m Ginette.Curtis: And I’m Curtis.Ginette: And you are listening to Data Crunch.Curtis: A podcast about how applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are changing the world.Ginette: A Vault Analytics production.Ginette: Ad spaceCurtis: Let’s introduce you to our guest: Nic Ryan. He is an experienced data scientist and LinkedIn influencer who has helped a lot of aspiring data scientists in their journey into the profession. He’s been part of many different data teams, small and large, in big companies and startups, and he wrote a book called, “The Data Scientist's Journey. The Guide for Aspiring Data Scientists,” which is based off the thousands of questions he’s been asked about becoming a data scientist.Nic: It started off with failure. Originally, I wanted to go over to the States to play basketball, so I’m a failed basketball player, and there’s a couple reasons why I didn’t make it: one is I wasn’t tall enough to be a small forward, which is a bit ironic. I’m only 6’2”, but probably the more important reason is I wasn’t very good, but I didn’t know that at the time, so I didn't get a scholarship to play basketball, but I did get a scholarship to do actuarial studies. So it’s not a bad backup plan. But from there, I ended up falling into more of the stats side of things, of insurance, so the statistical modeling, pricing, fire, and theft, I really enjoyed that kind of stuff, so over time, I did more of that. Did some of my post-grad actuarial exams, and I was doing some reading on the weekends and finding out more about stats and a bit about code and a bit about R, and what really did it for me was having an incredibly long train ride to get to work. It was a couple hours each way, and so this is of course, this is the era of MOOCs, and rather than just talking to people, I just ended up joining the MOOCs, and so, really enjoyed that, and this whole thing of data science has just kind of grown around me, and I ended up working for one of the banks and doing their credit scoring and consulting with different banks for a long period of time, and I got a call out of the blue to, a guy just gave me a plane ticket and said come talk to us. So I flew there, and they offered me what was really a head of data science role, so there was a team overseas and a couple teams in Australia doing data science, and yeah, we did some pretty awesome things with NLP and bank statements and built some pretty sophisticated risk models; it was probably best in the country at that time. It’s about 60 miles away from Sydney where I worked, and so it was a real opportunity. It was probably two hour door to door each way, and that was the other thing as well: that was a long time away from family, which wasn’t cool. I had a couple young kids. That’s part of the reason I have my own business now is that I’ve spent too much time away from my daughters. The result of it being I had a whole heap of dead time that I could either use or not use, and so I was able to teach myself code and teach myself some more stats and machine learning and stuff pretty quickly when you have a couple hours of dead time each day, you become pretty good, pretty quickly,