Zhaoyang Song is a master’s student in Communication Data Science at USC. After realizing that some repetitive work can be done more efficiently, she was motivated to study data science. She recommended that beginners should start with a real project instead of reading data science books nor taking online classes.
- What are your undergraduate and graduate majors?
I am a student in the M.Sc. in Communication Data Science. I studied business for my undergraduate.
- What was your turning point (event, person, or work) that motivated you to study data science?
At my first internship in the media industry, my leader gave me hundreds of media to connect with the information in an excel file. The file was big and took a long time to open. The data was messy. She wanted me to combine them all and made a list that she could use for sending mass e-mails.
“Take your time. The workload is big, but you can give it to me in a week.”
I always think that any repetitive work can be done more smartly. So I googled VBA, copied and pasted some codes. It turns out that I sent the file to her within 3 hours.
- How did you start learning data science (online course or course offered by a college)?
I took a quantitative analysis and questionnaire class in junior year. We were using SPSS. I learned that logic and statistics thinking behind the data analysis process is far more critical than processing the data.
- Looking back to the beginning of your journey, do you have any advice for students or beginners who want to learn more about data science?
Do not read data science books.
Do not take online classes.
Give yourself a real project and start solving this project. If you have any questions, search the web and ask people, then it will be the time to read more books and take more classes.
- How will you apply your skills to solve real-world problems? Why do you care about solving this problem?
In the machine learning classes, the professor gave us different topics for the problem in our assignments. Some topics are of personal interest, such as automatic text generation and image processing. Some are not so interesting to me. When I am working on problems that I am interested in, I am more motivated.
- Why do more people need to study data science?
Studying data science does not necessarily mean that you will become a professional data scientist. But it will help you solve the real-world problems that you care about.