Work + Grad School: A Data Scientist’s Survival Guide (Part 1)

Foreward

So, you’ve decided you’re doing it.

You’re going to continue with your full-time job while pursuing some sort of graduate degree. Seems easy enough — you’ve watched a video lecture here and there, read a few topical books, maybe even done a whole Coursera course — all while you worked. Why not take it up a notch and get a full degree while you’re at it? Besides, with the recent proliferation of (reputable) online education opportunities, you don’t even need to be anywhere near the school you’re attending to get a degree. Working a full-time job and attending a high-caliber graduate school is now a legitimate option that, as recently as 10 years ago, simply didn’t exist.

These were my thoughts at age 23. I was working as a data analyst in Cincinnati and realized that if I wanted to be in the profession long-term, I was going to need a quantitative masters degree. As straightforward as that sounds, the problem was that that degree wasn’t going to do the same things for me that a medical or law degree would. Put another way, I wasn’t in a situation where a single piece of paper would allow me to do a job that was radically different from one I was already doing; to be sure, the analytics field values graduate education, but it values it in conjunction with experience, not as a standalone entity. So, if I eventually wanted to manage, or break into data science, acquiring a graduate degree was a river I would have to cross.

In addition to this, there isn’t really a “best” data science degree. The top contenders — computer science, statistics, and operations research — are obvious, but no one of these paints the whole picture. The same way that a deep knowledge of data structures isn’t going to help you specify a regression model, knowing that a given estimator is unbiased isn’t going to help you figure out efficient I/O for a 400GB table. To succeed in data science, you need to build skills in all of these areas, to varying extents, simultaneously. You also need to learn how they interact and find application in a real-world business setting — knowing things in a vacuum is not going to justify your salary. After some thought, I concluded that the optimal path for me was simply to work and go to school at the same time, which I like to think of as a sort of modern-day apprenticeship program.

In late 2014 I decided to go for it and applied to Texas A&M’s Masters of Statistics program, which not only appeared to be very well-regarded, but also had the option of 100% online completion. I would be able to continue my work of designing and evaluating real-world advertising campaigns, while earning the degree that I had decided I needed. Easy, right? Wrong. While it has brought me a great many benefits, earning this degree has easily been the most challenging endeavor I have ever undertaken. Four years (!) later, however, I am in my final semester, and consider myself to be a work + school veteran. Reflecting on that journey, I realized that there were a multitude of things I wish I had known prior to starting, if for no other reason than that I would have had a better idea of what I was getting myself into. This guide is the brief manual that I wish that I had had access to 4 years ago — if you are considering the pursuit of a graduate degree while working, or are already doing so, this is for you, and I hope you find it useful.

Level-Setting

This guide is written from the perspective of an industry data scientist, but can apply to a variety of professions. I’ve learned a few things over the years, and am going to walk through some realities of the simultaneous work and school lifestyle, along with a few best practices. Before you start this journey, however, you need to be honest with yourself, and determine if you are willing/able to take the steps necessary to succeed. This path is not for everyone — FULL STOP. If you can complete it, the rewards are sizable, but there is a lot you are going to have to give up to get there. The next section will go into much more detail, but this is a sampling of things that are difficult to juggle with work and school:

· Pursuing several time-intensive hobbies

· Caring for especially needy pets

· Maintaining a rich and active social life (aka: >1 bar outing a week)

· Spending 90% of your current free time with your significant other

· Owning a house

· Raising children

I am definitely not saying that any of these is impossible to attain, but balancing formal education — along with all of your current responsibilities — will force some prioritization.

Realities and Best Practices

In this section, I will go through a few of the most compelling realities I experienced, along with best practices that I found to work through them.

Reality One

Your friends, family, and colleagues are not going to understand what you’re going through

I am not a parent, but one thing that I have noticed amongst the new parents in my life is a fairly dramatic change in personal focus after they have a child (no kidding). Their former hobbies and interests are put on the back-burner, and they dedicate the vast majority of their time towards embracing and managing their new responsibilities. They also tend to spend more time with other parents, largely because the other existing parents are the only people around who truly know what it’s like to live their lifestyle. They’ll tell me about the unexpected doctor visits, the 2 hours of sleep they got, or having to clean out their car after a kid got sick in it, and while I can attempt to appreciate what all this must be like, there is no way I can truly understand it, without actually going through it.

To a lesser extent, the exact same situation will befall you as a working student. Your friends aren’t going to understand why you don’t have time to go to that happy hour. Your relatives aren’t going to understand why you’re visiting less. And your significant other is not going to understand why you can’t just get your homework done faster. Unless these individuals have gone through something similar to what you are doing, get ready to work on “expectation management” and to socially disappoint more than a few people.

Best Practice

To the extent it is possible, find a community

In years past, finding a community while engaging in some sort of education was almost never an issue, because you would typically be attending class in-person. Now that we have online education, however, there is no guarantee that you will be presented with the opportunity to organically meet peers who are in the same boat as yourself. This community is important — when things are getting hectic before a mid-term, it’s really reassuring to know that you aren’t the only person who might be struggling with the situation. This might be the most important thing I can suggest — if you feel like you are going it alone, you are much more likely to abandon your program.

You need to be proactive in making connections — most classes will have discussion boards where you can post questions or help out other students with their own. I have found that my own enjoyment of classes was directly associated with how much I engaged with the discussion boards; people are very appreciative of someone else taking the time to work through their questions, or at least try. Most online programs will also have a global discussion forum — it is worth posting a note to see if anyone else lives in your general area and would be open to a once-a-semester meetup. Additionally, don’t hesitate to look for people outside of your program — working students are nothing new, and you may have coworkers or neighbors who are also working on a degree.

Reality Two:

Your work performance will become higher variance

One of the reasons that people pursue simultaneous education and employment is that they hope their studies will make them better at their jobs. This is something that I found to be absolutely the case, but not every day. The day after you finish a particularly difficult assignment, you are probably not going to be 100% motivated to crush it at your job. Similarly, the day before a midterm, you are probably not going to be totally “there” in whatever meetings you have. There is also the issue of your outside of work time — if you were accustomed to spending hours per week keeping up on technical topics directly related to your job, that is going to have to take a back seat unless it is also directly relates to your coursework.

There are also, however, moments when what you are doing in school perfectly aligns with what you are doing at work, and in those moments, you will be providing massive value. For example, I once found myself setting up direct response advertisements while studying formal experimental design. I am quite confident that that the test designs and measurement plans I came up with for that project were far superior to those I had produced before, and were immediately enabled by my studies.

Best Practice:

Continually validate what you are doing

Assuming that that material you are studying relates at least somewhat to your work, the best way to validate the effort you are putting into school is to find opportunities to directly apply it. For me, this meant reviewing prior projects I had done through a new lens — maybe the chi-squared test I had done before would have been better off as a logistic regression. It also meant encouraging myself to view problems in light of my newfound knowledge — when you spend 15–20 hours a week studying the analysis of time series data, it is amazing how many time series problems you will find naturally in your work.