Careers and data science

[From a 2013 talk by Acculation’s CEO to undergraduate political science majors about careers in data science.]

Hi, I’m Dr. Werner Krebs, Ph.D., CEO of Acculation.  Hopefully, you’ll subscribe to our YouTube channel (click here) and checkout one of these other videos on our channel when you’re done with this one, and if you like this video be sure to click that like button.

Careers: what not to do when applying for a job?

A couple of approaches don’t work.

“Hi, I’m a really bright guy. Hire me! I have a new idea!”

With the possible exception of strategy consultants, academics, and think tanks, companies generally don’t hire people just because they’re smart. They hire people because they have an existing business process need.

So, they’re making widgets or making software and they have to too many order for the widgets or their
software. And so they look at Bob and they say, “Okay, well, we’ve got too many orders coming in.”

“So, what we want to do is: We want to take Bob over there and clone him.”

Except, of course, human cloning is illegal. So they take a step back and decide:

“Well, we can’t clone Bob even though he’s really good at making widgets.”

“So, what else can we do?”

They look at the job market and they say, “Can we find someone who is just like Bob? So, that we can meet our customer demand?” And along those lines: “Hi, I’m a really bright” or, “Hi, I graduated summa cum laude in English! You should hire me because I have this very impressive summa cum laude English degree!” That doesn’t work.

For most people that very impressive summa cum laude degree in English means that the only thing they’re really comfortable with is writing. And writing, unfortunately, by itself, does not pay very well because there are a
lot of other writers out there.

If you want to be hired just for being bright or for having a very impressive college degree consider consider
consulting. They’ll usually hire you because you have an MBA or other application of strategy consultant.

If you want to be hired because you have a new idea that you think will revolutionize the market consider doing a start
up. Go through an accelerator or incubator. Then, you’ll be employed by investors backing your new idea. I mentioned a couple of the other things that do employ people just because they’re very bright: academics, universities, and think-tanks.

So, who am I?

I’m Werner G. Krebs (longer online bio here) I began programming at a very early age. I was a University of Chicago undergraduate math major worked for a Nobel Laureate in economics. Did a Yale PhD in the this new field of bioinformatics, technically Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry. So bioinformatics is computer science plus biology. This led to a career as a computer science or a data scientist worked for some very famous people, did some time in academia, at a software company and then on to finance as a senior analyst at what is now Bank of America managing their billion hedging portfolio.

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Legal Note: From a 2013 talk by Acculation’s CEO to undergraduate political science majors about careers in data science. Video and this blog posting (C) 2017 Acculation. All Rights Reserved. If you find this message on an website other than acculation.com or youtube.com — and this has happened or this note wouldn’t be here — please help us out by contacting acculation.com.

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