Why data science???

To answer the question of why data science, the question of what is data science has to be answered first. So what is data science?
Well if you break down the word literally data science would be the study of data. That doesn’t really say anything by itself , because what is data.
Data is plural form of the Latin word datum. Datum means “something given”. So from that we can piece together that data science means given something, do science to it. This sounds very broad because it is. Data science is impossibly broad because most problems can be seen as a data science problem. As long as you have observations IE data you can use the data science process to extract meaning.

Data Science is still a new field as stands today. Looking at google trends for “Data Science” shows that these terms were not commonly put together till around 2013-2014 and has been steadily increasing in search popularity since then. While this does not mean anything definitively it does seem to indicate that field is growing. For someone looking for a job a new growing industry is often a good place to be. One of the things that comes with a growing industry particularly a tech industry is constant change. In data science you will have to be constantly learning. As new modeling techniques become available a good data scientist will be expected to rapidly adopt and incorporate these new processes. This to me is one of the major draws of the data science field.

Another facet of data science is in the translation of data. Not every person that needs to use data will be able to digest it in a raw form. So to help people make decisions data science and analysis steps in to present the data in an easy to absorb medium. This is called data visualization and it is an easy to over look part of data science. Data visualization is basically marketing for your analysis of the data and in large part determines the impact of your analysis. Just look at infographics there is no denying that a nice info graphic with have more impact than a paper to the masses.

These points are all good general reasons that data science is a good choice of a career path, but for me the they aren’t the main draws of data science. For me the challenge of continuing to learn new things is very rewarding.

I am just starting my journey into data science so I’m sure my ideas and perception of data will continue to change but I feel like this novices take on data science will be fun for me to look back on and compare to my future understanding.