Science to Data Science

I just finished the Pivigo S2DS virtual program this year. For five weeks I've been working on international trade data under the mentoring of the UK Food Safety Agency (FSA). The goal was to analyze the international trade of food commodities and characterize... Read More the complex associated network.
Overall, it's been a great experience for someone new to data science as myself. The program assumes though that you have decent familiarity with coding, specially in Python or R. No training here.
The Pivigo mentors were really involved and kept track of our progress on a daily basis solving also problems on the technical front pretty quickly.
The external mentor was also reachable and responsive with at least one meeting a week.
The whole program is well organized and offers a bunch of pretty interesting seminars on several topics including group dynamics, presentation skills, CV refurbishing for data science job search...
Something very important to keep in mind: the program is very intensive and there is no way it can be taken as a part time endeavor.
A couple of perks: after embarrassing procrastination, I finally was pushed to use Git and Slack (no pun intended).

Was it worth it?
is the first question everybody asks after I tell them about my experience at the 5-week virtual Data Science programme I attended in March-April 2016. People assumed I was on holiday knowing I took those weeks off from work and felt confirmed... Read More when I came back inspired and with fresh ideas. But hearing that I had vanished from the physical world to be working virtually on a data science project with people from all over the world was mostly received with astonishment. Hence the question.

Being completely submerged in the world of data science for 5 weeks was nothing like a holiday. It was an intense, challenging, often frustrating and definitely exhausting experience.
It was also life-changing.

For years I had been wondering how to continue my professional journey and how to leave the world of academia. And after getting to work on a Data Science project for a company I learned following things about it:

1. I can do this.
The skills required for a data science job are the same ones I had developed over years to analyze and explain science. The tools were different but learning things fast and well is the one thing that had been required from me since I started my bachelor studies.

2. I like it.
Maybe more importantly, was to realize that I liked the kind of work involved in Data Science projects. It is my biggest imperative to work on things I enjoy. And if you also like to solve problems, like to code and enjoy exploring and cleaning data, love visualizing data and discovering stories and finding the best way of telling them for non-experts, then Data Science might also be the job for you.

3. It's everywhere.
At the beginning of the project, I felt lost in names of tools and concepts I had never heard of. I was wondering how I, as a tech-savvy scientist working on data analysis, could be not aware of such an underground world. But suddenly I started seeing that these things were everywhere. Every city has a data science meet-up, my favorite technology festival had dozens of talks and workshops about it, and a quick search in the job market gave me hundreds of vacancies in Germany for people with these skills. I find it so funny how everybody is searching for those 'unicorns' while people with the potential skillset are hidden in universities without knowing and worrying about their future. S2DS makes a great job at connecting these worlds.

4. I'm not alone.
Having said that people like this can be found in Science, I have to add that at least in the life sciences, they are indeed rare. Now through the S2DS network, I was put in contact with people with a similar background and going through the exact same eye-opening experience. Moreover, the alumni network of hundreds of Data Scientists working all over Europe is maybe the most useful resource you'll get from this programme once you start working in the field.

So, the short answer is:
Yes. It was definitely worth it.

PS regarding the job support: when I attended S2DS everything was heavily UK-based and so were also the availbe job opportunities that arose directly from the course. As I was only interested in job opportunities within Germany, this was not so helpful to me. However, I see many alumni from S2DS working now in German companies, and I guess that with the programme and projects expanding, so will be the job opprtunities.