What do you think being a data scientist is about?
I first started hearing people talk about data scientists about 10 years ago. At that point people were mainly saying data scientists were doing data mining with large amounts of data. More recently, I think being a data scientist is about helping organizations and groups get useful information from their data. Many organizations collect large amounts of data and want to get value from that data. Data scientists can help work with the data and build useful models.

What do you see as the major duties and/or knowledge areas?
I see the major duties of data scientists as getting large amounts of data ready for analysis, building models from the data, and reporting on the data in ways that are useful for organizations. Knowledge areas include domain expertise, computer programming skills, model building, and enough statistics to have to confirm analysis.

What differences/similarities do you see between data scientists and statisticians?
They both require some knowledge of statistics too. In regard to differences, data scientists seem to work with larger amounts of unstructured data. They also often need more domain knowledge in their business area. In contrast, statisticians seem to work more often with planned research studies like clinical trials. They also can focus more on the theoretical areas of statistics.

How do you view yourself in relation to these two areas? I see myself as having developed skills in both data science and statistics. My own interest at present is more with more traditional planned research studies. However, I’m open to exploring data science especially as it might enhance research studies. I chose to work on a statistics degree rather than an analytics degree because I wanted more emphasis on statistics