Industry Jobs
In this blog post, Paul Litvak, a Quantitative Researcher at Google (with a PhD. in Behavioral Decision Research), talks about life in industry.
Here’s one of his suggestions for launching a career outside of academia:
Learn some programming. R, then SQL, then Python, or some other scripting language. The more programming you learn the higher up the food chain you can go. If you know a lot of programming, you aren’t limited by what data exists, but only by what data you can create. This is hugely empowering, and increases your impact considerably. However, if all you learn is R, that is still incredibly useful,and will still get you into a variety of jobs. (emphasis added)
Great article! Thanks for passing it along, Nicole. I couldn’t help but notice another quotable line (emphasis added):
“Nowadays it is common to use some machine learning algorithm to classify some otherwise messy data. In doing so, it is crucial to be able to think clearly about false positives and false negatives, and tradeoffs between the various costs of being wrong versus not making predictions for some cases. Fundamental statistical reasoning concepts (e.g. Bayes rule) never go out of style!”