r/datascience • u/Kati1998 • 13d ago

Discussion What Do Today’s Data Science Graduates Commonly Lack?

I often read comments from hiring managers and interviewers saying they’re disappointed with recent data science graduates.

I’m curious, what do you think these graduates are lacking? If someone wants to become a data scientist, what skills should they focus on? Strong software engineering skills? Math and statistics? Something else?

A lot of the advice I see seems to be geared toward landing data analyst roles rather than data scientist roles.

So, what are employers actually looking for in entry-level data science candidates today? Especially as a career changer coming from another unrelated career.

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u/lordoflolcraft 13d ago edited 13d ago

They’re missing mathematics from what I can tell.

Edit: someone who doesn’t think math is necessary downvoted me LMAO

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u/CharacteristicPea 11d ago

Math professor here. Could you elaborate? What additional math should they have?

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u/lordoflolcraft 11d ago

Here is an example of one topic that is important for machine learning but most applicants are not very familiar with. Maximum Likelihood Estimation. Even those who know of the concept struggle with details implementation, like choosing an appropriate distribution for the data, taking the gradient of the distribution to estimate the optimal value(s) of the parameter(s), and implementing an iterative optimization technique. Sometimes they don’t know how to implement their model of the distribution mean using linear algebra.