Can I be an astronaut if I take bsc physics and later msc?

I am 37+ years old with a BSc and MSc in physics with work exp in six-sigma and simulation. I would like to make a career change to data science but afraid that the age is an issue. What do you think and recommend?

• I am a certified six-sigma black belt and worked mostly in the coal mining industry using MINITAB as the statistical package for data analysis and familiar with R and also conducted dynamic simulation studies of complex supply chains.  I know that in tech jobs, there is an age barrier but i am not sure with respect to to data science, especially where the business aspect is so important, and not only technical skills.

• Answer:

  I can't speak for others, and I am definitely relatively new to the field, but for my first hire in our data science team, the runner up was a guy about your age with no formal education but great Python on github. It's precisely the kind of job where all that matters is output quality, and the only hiring criteria (beyond being able to speak English) was the candidate answers to 7 pages of fairly involved, real world problems with sample data from our shops we sent out to every applicant. What I was looking for is some knowledge of high level functional languages like Haskell as a filter for competence, and some degree of experience with bash and something like Python just because a large component of our work ends up being engineering rather than just coming up with cool algorithms. I would have liked your profile because it's harder to find people who can do meaningful analysis than engineers who can code in your language of choice (hence using functional programming ability as a filter, as it requires being able to think well). I would have tested your ability with linux and scripting languages. The specific language would not have mattered so much, although the Python, Lisp or Haskell candidate has a huge advantage over the C guy just because of the abstraction facilities offered by those languages. Our candidates needed to both be able to pick the right algorithm and parameters for the job, and implement the solution in whatever systems were touched. For example, you might be taking impressions and visits from a web analytics solution's data dump onto an FTP, joining it with data from your Oracle backend (not my choice...!) into Redshift (which requires being able to use AWS), designing and running a Haskell algorithm on the data in your EC2 instance, and outputting it to a web page (which may be built in Yesod, just for fun) or on the online shop (e.g. as a recommendation engine). This involves being able to plug a black box to a different tech stack, in our case a Haskell engine into a Java/PHP shop. It's a fun job! Good luck and let us know how you did.