Five things to focus on as an aspiring Data Scientist

With so many interesting machine learning models to learn about and problems to solve it can be easy to forget about one of the core skills you actually need to be an effective data scientist. The vast majority of data scientists are going to have end-to-end responsibility for owning their own data pipelines and sourcing their own data. Also -- you should never have to rely on someone else to pull data for you. It might now be one of the "sexy" skills that are associated with the job, but it is essential (trust me on this one, in FAANG companies you will likely be tested on SQL at interview as an initial screening task). This is perhaps a little more controversial.