“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” (quote believed to be originally by Mark Twain)
People talk about education a lot these days, particularly in a data science setting. However, we need to discern between actual education and training. Both are essential, but it is the former that holds the most value. The latter is easier and oftentimes faster, but it may not be a good investment of your time if it is not accompanied by the former. Education is all about mindset development and the ability to feel inspired from knowledge, thereby developing a healthy yearning for it. It is what happens when you teach a child how to play a game, or do a specific task. Although it’s more of a state of mind than anything else, education also has a formal aspect to it which is related to courses, seminars, workshops and talks, geared towards enhancing one’s understanding and comprehension of the topic at hand. Training on the other hand is more geared towards techniques, methods, and the technical details of the topic taught. This is useful, of course, since every data scientist needs to know all these things. That’s why there are so many data science books and videos out there! However, knowing how to build an SVM or a neural network doesn’t make someone a competent data scientist. In fact, in some cases it doesn’t make him even an employable one. Perhaps there is a reason why most companies require X years of experience in their recruits. Some things in data science you can only learn through time, by practicing them and by developing an intuition for the data and how it is processed. Although the idea that a data scientist has to have X years of experience to be worthy is something that remains debatable (why X and not Y?), this trend shows that hiring managers can spot a difference between someone who knows data science from a book (or videos) and someone who knows the craft because she has worked the data and has developed a bunch of models, through lots of trials and the inevitable mistakes that ensue. Education is therefore something that can be attained through experience, not just reading and watching data science material on the Safari platform. The latter can be a great start, but you still need to get your hands dirty and also think about the whole thing, instead of just following recipes, from a data science cookbook. It’s important to know techniques, no doubt, but unless you have developed an understanding that allows you to go beyond these techniques and explore alternative features and alternative models, you may never grow beyond the advanced beginner stage. Even someone who has spend most of his life in data science can still learn about this field, as it's a) very diverse and wide-spread, and b) always evolving. Personally, I still find that I’m learning new things as I delve deeper into the field and as I converse with other data scientists and A.I. professionals, of all levels. This too can be a form of education, not any less valuable than the education of creating a new data analytics method, or a new data product. The moment someone starts looking down on education and thinks that he knows “enough” is the moment he begins becoming obsolete.
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Zacharias Voulgaris, PhDPassionate data scientist with a foxy approach to technology, particularly related to A.I. Archives
December 2022
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