Advise

Question

I have a Finance background but I'm interested in a Data Science course that I've enrolled in. What are some of the challenges I'm going to experience and how can I overcome them? I'm studying python and R on the side. How good do I need to be in either language or any other to go into stuff like machine learning which is part of the data science course?

Answer 1

Key challenge in data science is a deep understanding of math and statistics.
But also intuition and problem solving skills in these areas (critical thinking, creativity, internet search skills, etc.)

Python and R (or any other language for that matter) are merely tools to be picked according to the solution chosen. The better you know the ecosystem of each the more efficient you'll be at coding by reusing what's already written & tested. A deep understanding of paradigms is also fundamental and that's a real challenge since those are really poorly explained on the net.

In general people don't understand that what's key are effective and efficient solutions, and languages & coding are secondary.