What careers can I pursue with a degree in Math and Computational Sciences? (MCS) I'm interested in working in data analysis/optimization and wanted to know if an MCS degree was the way to go/as well as if anyone has any advice/info about being an analyst

Hi Jake,
You can get into data analyst career with MCS degree. If you can additionally learn Business intelligence tools and software, that will be of great help in your career. Data Analyst starts with understanding the business data and metrics, churn large volume of data to arrive at business insights which is helpful in key decision making. Visualization tools like tableau will help you present your analysis to the business in an appealing way which is an additional skill.

Data analyst is a broad term. You can choose a particular domain (pricing/marketing/operations/finance) and a industry ( healthcare/IT/automotives/banking etc) and work to become a SME (subject matter expert) as your career goal.

Good luck

Hi Jake,

Data analysts collect, process and perform statistical analyses of data. Their skills may not be as advanced as data scientists (e.g. they may not be able to create new algorithms), but their goals are the same – to discover how data can be used to answer questions and solve problems.

Depending on their level of expertise, data analysts may:

• Work with IT teams, management and/or data scientists to determine organizational goals


• Mine data from primary and secondary sources


• Clean and prune data to discard irrelevant information


• Analyze and interpret results using standard statistical tools and techniques


• Pinpoint trends, correlations and patterns in complicated data sets


• Identify new opportunities for process improvement


• Provide concise data reports and clear data visualizations for management


• Design, create and maintain relational databases and data systems


• Triage code problems and data-related issues

Data analysts are sometimes called “junior data scientists” or “data scientists in training.” Instead of being free to create their own big data projects, they may be limited to tackling specific business tasks using existing tools, systems and data sets.

However, there are plenty of companies who don’t make a clear distinction between the two roles. In some cases, a data analyst/scientist could be writing queries or addressing standard requests in the morning and building custom solutions or experimenting with relational databases, Hadoop and NoSQL in the afternoon.

Most candidates for entry-level jobs will need a bachelor’s degree in math, statistics computer science, information management, finance or economics. All of these subjects place a heavy emphasis on statistical and analytical skills.

What Kind of Skills Will I Need?

Technical Skills

• Statistical methods and packages (e.g. SPSS)
  R and/or SAS languages


• Data warehousing and business intelligence platforms


• SQL databases and database querying languages


• Programming (e.g. XML, Javascript or ETL frameworks)


• Database design


• Data mining


• Data cleaning and munging


• Data visualization and reporting techniques


• Working knowledge of Hadoop & MapReduce


• Machine learning techniques

http://www.mastersindatascience.org/careers/data-analyst/

Luck!