If I have a BA in economics, what steps should I take to become a data scientist?

Get your hands dirty on real world datasets. Spend countless hours exploring datasets that you find genuinely interesting. Then to give yourself a longterm goal, look at some of the challenges on Kaggle (http://www.kaggle.com/) and ask yourself, how would I actually go about winning one these competitions one day? You might notice most of the winners are developing solutions in R or Python; learning one of these tools is probably a good first step. If you're enough of an autodidact to figure out what you need to learn, and then passionate enough to commit the hours, you'll make a good data scientist. This could involve graduate study, but it could also involve industry experience. Needless to say, there is no course or certification that can make you a good data scientist. You gotta put in the 10,000 hours...

If you're interested in learning SAS, these Learning Paths offer courses geared towards data scientists! http://support.sas.com/training/us/paths/ You can also contact a curriculum consultant at or 800-333-7660 for additional guidance. Good luck!