Step 1: Think about becoming a lawyer but ditch that because you can’t stand foreign political history classes. Add a philosophy double major because sureee that’ll help🙄. Then switch to psychology, meet an awesome statistician and decide you love statistics
in your last semester of college.
graduate. Work in a cognitive neuroscience lab while living at home, apply to data science grad programs, get rejected by Berkeley, get into Chapman university, find an advisor who needs someone with stats AND psych expertise,
fall more in love with statistics, but feel like an imposter, get #statsTwitter famous, write a lot about stats, edit a lot of other peoples stats writing, take on a full time teaching job in the last semester of your PhD program (also make sure a pandemic and
incredibly important election are happening at the same time so that you can be stressed ALL THE TIME.
Step 2: be a data scientist.
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Moving from psych to stats/DS is totally doable Depending on your training, there may be some gaps you need to fill, content-wise, but those gaps 1) aren't insurmountable + 2) will not automatically make you a bad data person just because you're working on filling them.
Doing good DS requires hard work/rigor but it’s not exclusive to “math” people. You can do it.
2/8
Personally, I had gaps in math + comp sci. I learned to code (Python, R, C++, SQL) and took/audited a bunch of probability, stats, and linear algebra classes. Those classes CERTAINLY helped me, but I could've learned the content w/o them it was just easier/more structured.