amathew
Distinguished Member
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2011
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What I did was not exactly the same but might have been more unusual. Undergrad in business & economics, then MBA in marketing and strategy, then worked a year and a half at an agency specializing in SEM and data science. Went back to school this year to get a MSc in statistics. It will take me about 2.5 years with the pre-reqs. I'm in mid-20s but still a couple years older than most classmates. No regrets so far.
What is your end goal? PhD in statistics? Work as a "data scientist"?
What does your coursework look like? Typical stats MS stuff (linear model, glm's, categorical data analysis, etc) or is it more applied. Have any of your classes really dug into endogeneity or omitted variable bias? I've always found it odd have stats has downplayed endogeneity is coursework. Maybe it's assumed that people would pursue jobs in the realm of experiments and clinical trials.
I recently interviewed for a Sr Data Scientist position and the interviewee was this really smart PhD from MIT. He had the same specialty and intellectual interests that I had, and it seems a PhD is the only way to go unless you can get one of those "causal inference" jobs at Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc, which is very difficult as those teams tend to be pretty small and require skills that only PhD's have. Made me want to pursue a PhD even more.