What is a good field to major in science?

What is the most useful major/field of study for someone willing to work in the field of Data Science?

  • I am pursuing a bachelors in Computer Science currently and will graduate in 2013. I will most probably apply for grad school. What kind of graduate programs should I be looking at and at which Universities ?

  • Answer:

    Data Science is a bit of a fuzzy term. All scientists work with data, the question is where the data comes from. My understanding is that what we call "Data Science" usually involves enormous amounts of data, typically generated by human actions. Of course it's not limited to that, but my view is biased towards what we do at LinkedIn. A bachelors degree in Computer Science is a good start, and you could become a Data Scientist simply by brushing up on your scientific method skills: statistics, testing hypotheses, etc. as well as learning the most common tools currently used in the field: Map/Reduce, Hadoop, R, etc. If you want to go to grad school, I'd say any field that's very rigorous and math-heavy would help. Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics or even Physics. You may want to do a search on LinkedIn for Data Scientist and see the backgrounds of people who hold that title.

Diego Basch at Quora Visit the source

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If your already doing many statistics units, do a basic philosophy unit. Philosophy helps you in statistics to think for yourself and not just be a mindless number cruncher.

Philip O'Neil

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