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Towards Data Science - 12. Rachael Tatman - Data science at Kaggle
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12. Rachael Tatman - Data science at Kaggle

Towards Data Science

11/06/19

48m

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Featured In

One question I’ve been getting a lot lately is whether graduate degrees — especially PhDs — are necessary in order to land a job in data science. Of course, education requirements vary widely from company to company, which is why I think the most informative answers to this question tend to come not from recruiters or hiring managers, but from data scientists with those fancy degrees, who can speak to whether they were actually useful.

That’s far from the only reason I wanted to sit down with Rachael Tatman for this episode of the podcast though. In addition to holding a PhD in computational sociolinguistics, Rachael is a data scientist at Kaggle, and a popular livestreaming coder (check out her Twitch stream here). She’s has a lot of great insights about breaking into data science, how to get the most out of Kaggle, the future of NLP, and yes, the value of graduate degrees for data science roles.

Previous Episode

One thing that you might not realize if you haven’t worked as a data scientist in very large companies is that the problems that arise at enterprise scale (and well as the skills that are needed to solve them) are completely different from those you’re likely to run into at a startup.

Scale is a great thing for many reasons: it means access to more data sources, and usually more resources for compute and storage. But big companies can take advantage of these things only by fostering successful collaboration between and among large teams (which is really, really hard), and have to contend with unique data sanitation challenges that can’t be addressed without reinventing practically the entire data science life cycle.

So I’d say it’s a good thing we booked Sanjeev Sharma, Vice President of Data Modernization and Strategy at Delphix, for today’s episode. Sanjeev’s specialty is helping huge companies with significant technical debt modernize and upgrade their data pipelines, and he’s seen the ins and outs of data science at enterprise scale for longer than almost anyone.

Next Episode

Hi! It's YK here from CS Dojo. In this episode, I interviewed Jessica Li from Kaggle about how she worked with NASA to predict snowmelt patterns using deep learning. Hope you enjoy!

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