The biggest piece of news came in the afternoon before the day of our flight. Bill Blair, Canadian Minister of Public Safety, has announced in a press conference that work permit and student visa holders who reside in Canada, will be allowed in. This was what we were waiting for — and it took off a massive weight off our shoulders. Although still not an official document/statement by the government, we had something to hold on to.

Packed and ready, with all the sanitizers we had left, some gloves and alcohol-pads, we hopped on an Uber to the airport. Outside, people started lining up for food in the supermarkets, since Piñera, the Chilean president, has announced that a state of emergency will go into place starting midnight (an hour after our flight was scheduled to leave), meaning restrictions on leaving houses enforced by the army.

The airport, as expected, was packed with foreigners trying to make their way out before the border closes even further. Lines were overflowing into the sidewalks, passengers standing way to close to one another, but everyone seemed keen on boarding their flight ASAP. Overhearing some stories in lines it sounded like most people have just started their trip, or were somewhat in the middle, when they had to make their way back to Santiago and to their home countries.

Checking in and dropping our bags went smoothly, and so did going through border control. No one seemed to care if we had any symptoms upon leaving the country, contrary to the very efficient system Chile had in place for people coming into the country.

The flight from Santiago to Miami was pretty good — LATAM’s service is fantastic, when it does not involve calling their help line in a time of worldwide crisis (have been on the line for over 2 hours before giving up and sucking up the costs of a flight I couldn’t cancel). We were notified hand sanitizers are available in the galleys, and all flight attendants were wearing N95 masks and gloves, and seemed to minimize their aisle-traveling time.

Upon landing in Miami, I wondered what does coming into the US look like, a whole week after we left and passed there last. The answer was somewhat sad, disappointing and scary: it looks exactly the same. No one took our temperature when leaving the airplane or going into the terminal, or at any point later; no one asked about symptoms; and most of the staff was not wearing any protective gear. The urgency of the situation seemed to not have made its way to government agencies, but the positive side was the airport was quite empty, meaning at least citizens are starting to be aware.

After making our way to the ticketing counter (I’ve never in my life before booked flights with a person. Can you imagine that? This would be the third time this trip), in hope to change our upcoming flights from Miami to Newark and from LaGuardia to Montreal, to earlier as possible, and ideally without changing airports in NYC.

The first change was quite simple — and free. The American Airlines rep-lady was quite pleasant, chatty and kind, helping me forget for a bit longer that this is a super critical moment. As I was asking for the airplane type (I really hoped it wouldn’t be a tiny, ancient Embraer 140), the supervisor was walking between the counters announcing: “Ladies, Australia just closed its borders. If anyone is coming with requests to Australia, tell them they aren’t going anywhere”.

Our first flight booked, the rep started looking at the flights to Montreal. Now the stressful part started, with some questions:

AA: “Are you Canadian citizens?”

GT: “No, we’re residents” (handing out my Quebec health card)

AA: “OK good. What is this card? Do you have a permanent resident card?”

OJ: “We have a work permit, it’s in the passport” (taking his passport and opening on the permit page)

AA: “Ah ok, let me take a look.”

For a few minutes, the rep seemed to be struggling a bit with the system, trying to input our data. I, of course, went into a worry loop, that this is the point we’re going to get rejected, and OJ started mumbling something about getting a beach house for a while in Miami Beach.

But behold — after about 10 minutes, it worked. She didn’t ask anymore questions about our status in Canada, and we were checked in. We’re not staying in a beach house, but are one step closer to getting home.

An empty flight (10 people on board an A321) later, we landed in LaGuardia. As expected, no one talked to us when we landed, and we checked our bags again and sat down for a Shake Shack near the windows. I believe the entire terminal B had less than 100 people in it, and following Bill de Blasio’s instructions, all restaurants’ seating areas were closed to public.

Two hours later, when it was time to board, I expected the airline agents at the gate to check for symptoms, as we kept on reading in the news that Canada-bound flights will be asked to monitor passengers for symptoms and deny boarding to anyone presenting any of the 3 main symptoms. But again — the system seemed to not be working. No one asked anything, let alone taken temperature, and soon we were on our tiny, fragile Embraer 140 (😕) descending over the St. Lawrence river into Montreal-Trudeau.

Landing in Montreal, once again my hopes were up, that at least the Canadians must be doing it better than the Americans, when it comes to their healthcare. It was the case, but it was very minimal. As we made our way in the airport, two things happened:

1. We got a small sheet notifying us about the 14-day mandatory self-quarantine
2. We were asked if we had any symptoms.
3. That’s it.

Once again, no actual screening was done at the airport, and it was all based on people’s will to tell the truth. This was a bit alarming at this point in time, as the minimum expectation was for temperature checks to make sure no one is presenting severe symptoms.

A few questions later about where we went and for what purposes, did we bring anything back (yes! two bottles of Pisco that will power us via the mystic energy of Pisco Sours), and we were allowed to cross back in, and make our way home.

But at that point, I really didn’t care much anymore. I was glad I made it across all borders, and go up the stairs of my apartment for the last time in the coming two weeks.

The attempted way back home was originally published in Travel in the Times of Corona on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Needless to say it was a shit-night’s sleep. Come morning, we started searching for flights all over. It seemed like prices are changing all the time, and we tried to catch a good one.

OJ found a flight into Toronto (the goal was to get into Canada ASAP) leaving in two days, and we booked it on CheapOAir. Glad we made a move, we headed to grab breakfast in the same place as we did the first time we arrived in Chile. A problem rose when we failed to get a confirmation from the website, or from LATAM, hours after we booked. Stress level rises further.

I was hardly able to touch the food at breakfast, worrying this flight fell through, and was trying to multitask eating and alternative-flight searching, succeeding only on the latter. An American Airlines flight came up, at about 1,000$/person, one-way to New York, that departs on Wednesday night (all of this is happening on a Monday, by the way). I booked it quickly, to make sure it doesn’t magically become 5,000$, and got the confirmation immediately. Phewish.

Five minutes later, I’m getting a call from CheapOAir calling to confirm the original flight 🤦🏽‍♂️. At this point, I just cancelled it.

The idea to book a flight to NYC instead of all the way to Canada came from the understanding that we might not actually be able to make it into Canada. Having a plan-B ready was key — and in our case, it meant going somewhere that will allow us to easily board a flight to the UK or Israel, where we have citizenships.

The rest of the day passed in two main forms:

1. Checking for alternative flights that we might be able to change into, finding one or two that could be valid, trying to contact the airlines, and failing to do so with calls never going through or never being answered.
2. Staying on top of the news from Canada, Chile, US, UK and Israel. This was exhausting, time consuming and somewhat harder than one might think, as the amount of sources out there is ridiculous and the formal statements sometimes require much digging.

As part of the efforts to get more information I’ve been reaching out to the Canadian and Israeli embassy’s in Chile, while OJ tried the British one.

The British never answered, only with a generic email 2 days later.

The Israeli embassy was easy to get a hold of, but not very useful (to be fair, the questions I had were not very relevant and they would not have the answers). Retrospectively, I learned of at least two repatriation flights from Israel to Peru, so clearly, they’ve been doing stuff.

The Canadian was hard to get, but we managed to talk early in the morning after. My main concern, as I mentioned before, was whether we could go back into Canada as temporary workers. Unfortunately they had no valuable information — according to them, there was no official Foreign Affairs policy on whether temporary workers will be able to come back, and it might be up to the discretion of the border agent.

With all the information in hand (and new info flowing in constantly), we decided to stick to the plan:

1. Get out of Chile 🇨🇱
2. Get to a main hub with good worldwide connections 🇺🇸
3. Get into Canada 🇨🇦
4. If fails, go to Israel 🇮🇱 or the UK 🇬🇧

Now, we had nearly two whole days of waiting, before we can start our journey to the northern hemisphere.

Communication, or lack thereof, when most needed was originally published in Travel in the Times of Corona on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Once this was done, we started looking at alternatives to fly back to Canada from Santiago - and it looked awful. Most flights were north of 1,000$ one way (with American asking for a whopping 4300$. Guess they should win "flag carrier of the captialistic west"). Edit: apparently, American was not alone. Also LATAM and United marked prices between 4,000–9,500$.

Eventually, we found a glitch in a specific Copa flight, allowing us to return for 600$ each, but leaving on March 23 (a week after the time we searched). We quickly booked it so at least we have a way out.

Morning came, we were happy we found something to get us back home, and headed to a full day trip in the mountains.

But, this is how the day turned around:

3.35pm. We first got signal again and learned that Chile is closing its borders to all foreigners. This was something I thought could come but we didn’t realize it will be this fast and this abruptly.

4.40pm. We got back to town, got a local sim card and started checking what’s going on. Turns out the borders are due to close on Wednesday (call to the Israeli embassy clarified it means for incoming traffic and at the moment, so we could leave the country after that without a problem).

4.50pm. We booked a transfer to the nearest airport (Calama, CJC) hoping to get a flight to Santiago ASAP. The ride usually takes an hour and fifteen minutes. Our flight is scheduled for 4 days from now. Hopefully, we would be able to change it up.

5.05pm: As I started going through bunch of messages, an American friend who’s in Tunisia notified me that Canadian borders are about to close. Cue panic, round who-knows-how-many.

5.06pm. Tried to find information on any official government statements but all I got was news outlets: Canada is closing entrance to non-citizens, non-permanent-residents and Americans (why, I would never understand). Me (and OJ) had a problem: our immigration status in Canada is residents with work permits, meaning, we might not qualify.

5.10pm. OJ got a hold of an HR manager at his workplace, who provided valuable info - the border lockdown starts on Wednesday at 00:01. Meaning, we need to get to a border control station beforehand. It was Monday at 5.10pm, and we’re halfway across the world, and two hours away from the main international airport.

5.15pm. So, we tried calling the Canadian embassy to understand if we qualify to get in after the lockdown, but with no luck.

5.38. Our transfer van has arrived and we hurried in.

7.07: Arriving at Calama airport. The person at the counter took our request to change our existing flight due to the circumstances, and said it be done. Phew.

7.17: We were checked in for a flight departing at 19.58 to Santiago, Chile.

I was writing this from the plane, as a way to deal with the stress, and as we approach landing.

Next in line - we need to figure out whether the Wednesday deadline is actually true, find a flight that will arrive beforehand.

I’m posting this after the fact, as I was overwhelmed last night. Expect today’s update soon.

Border closures and the escape attempts from lockdown was originally published in Travel in the Times of Corona on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Montréal airport, we started noticing first signs of how things have changed. The terminal was oh-so-empty compared to past visits, and lines were non existent.

Boarding the flight, the hand-sanitizer (we call it SaniPoop) was put to good use, and I managed to stay on top of my face-touching and minimize it. We had an American Eagle Embraer-145, so little to do in how far we can get from others. We both were on the aisle and the window at the same time. As I sat down, the alcohol pads were ready and wiping has begun: the armrests, the seatbelt buckle, the tray and the window were all done thoroughly, before I finally buckled in more peacefully.

There was one person on board with a face mask, but that summed it up. The single flight attendant was not wearing any mask nor gloves and was operating absolutely as usual. I was almost surprised.

Getting to JFK for a layover was similar to any other visit to a US airport. Since we cleared customs in Canada, we just marched off the plane and were in the land of the free — able to walk anywhere, no one asking anything about our health, let alone inspecting us. The terminals at JFK were a different story than Montreal: here, masks were abundant, among staff and travelers, as well as latex gloves (which I thought I was the only one to think about, silly me).

I thought this represented very well the American healthcare system in general: everyone is making their own decisions, regardless of society and the people around them. Those who can and want to afford extra measures (regardless if useful or not), do so, and others just go by their day. I’ll get to that in a bit, but the arrival to Chile was a whole lot different.

At the gate, I realized the second lag of the trip is going to be much busier, and possibly much cough-ier: spotted three coughers lining up, and I’ve missed the first 3 groups that boarded 😷. And as our luck dictated, a somewhat sick lady was sitting just in front of us (putting my hopes for a 3 row safety buffer to early death). My sole consolation was that it was an absolutely-not-dry-cough, but a more phlegm-y one (here’s a sentence I’d never imagined I’d say!), which I hung on whenever she’d break into a new session of coughing.

After take off, a flight attendant handed out a customs form, like often happens. But towards the end of the flight, they went around with another form, which made me curious. When I got mine, turns out there’s a government health program that’s meant to halt COVID-19 from spreading around the country, so they begin questioning before landing. I was pleasantly surprised and happy to see that some countries don’t take it as light-mindedly as the States.

After landing and before going through passport control, we had to have our temperature taken (and I wondered — did Ms. Cough-y pass?) and review our questionnaire with a nurse (I believe/hope), before being allowed to clear customs.

We’re now a day in the trip, and occasionally can’t help it and reading up some latest news, and it sounds like my pessimistic predictions are slowly becoming real. Some of the latest was that Justin’s wife has tested positive; Montreal is starting to close down public spaces; we will have to go into a 14-day quarantine once we land (like they’ve been doing in Israel for the past 3 weeks); and last but not least — Canadian airports might be closing down for international travel.

Hoping for the best but continuing to think about the worst in between sightseeing and eating yummy Chilean foods 🇨🇱.

Flights, viruses and sanitizers was originally published in Travel in the Times of Corona on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So, I’m not gonna lie. I’m definitely an analytical person, or a blue person, as Thomas Erikson would say (recommend! even if you don’t believe in putting people into categories). I over-analyze and over think almost any aspect of my life, and well, this well planned trip to South America was one of them.

We booked in January, and have been super excited up until a few days ago. My partner is still excited. I am too. But I admit I’m also a bit terrified. If it was (were? #ESL) possible, I would maybe postpone this trip a bit, but on the other hand, maybe I didn’t try hard enough?

One way or another, the few days leading to departure have become much more stressful than usual, with the exponential growth of (official ones anyway — some interesting reading here and listening here) infections everywhere, intense news coverage (which I tend to over-consume, but omg did you see Johns Hopkins’ dashboard?), and elbow-bumping becoming an actual thing. And so, I went into a mini-loop of research and understanding the best practices for travelling safely, looking for masks but learning they’re not beneficial at this point assuming we’re not carrying the virus, and focusing on other methods of prevention.

For flight safety, there’s some really good information that I found on NatGeo. Apparently (maybe unsurprisingly), research has been done on how diseases spread on planes. The first myth to break is about the circulated air — air on airplanes is filtered with hospital grade filters (HEPA), where 99% of microbes are captured, and the filtering happens every few minutes. So it’s actually cleaner air than what you’d breath on a bus, train or metro system. The risk on planes, like anywhere else, is touching contaminated surface and then passing it on to your face (like my fav emoji 🤦‍♀). I’m not going to vomit back everything I read, but the chart above provided some useful insight so I’ll leave it there with the reference for you to browse (also, seatguru.com are you listening?).

As a face-toucher (my own face, that is), I’d have to challenge myself to decrease it to the minimum (maybe hot pepper fingers? 🌶️); I’ve found some alcohol pads for disinfection in a small pharmacy, we’ll use those to disinfect hard surfaces on the airplanes as we settle in; I got some latex gloves to disinfect with (and I suggested using those all the time in airports, but so far have been shut down by OJ) and some mini-Purells and a bigger one, to refill.

I guess that’s traveling in the times of corona!

It’s the morning of the flight(s) now, and we just learned that flights from Europe to the US have been stopped for a month. So, that’s taking away some stress for sure (NOT).

I’m excited but also still concerned about so many aspects:

• how infectious are airports?
• how weird is it to disinfect things around me in public?
• how many corona-carriers are going to be on board our flights?
• is it coronavirus, Coronavirus, Corona virus, or something else altogether?
• does the virus actually not do well in warm weather?
• what if one of us has it already and it will hit us during the trip?
• what if Trudeau decides to ban travel between Canada and other countries?
• how likely is it that we’ll be left stranded for a few months thousands of kilometres from our current home, and from our home countries?

and honestly, some more.

So — I’ll write about this experience, assuming I’ll survive it, when I feel like writing and connecting back to the world, and it’ll hopefully help me deal with the stress of living it and make vacay more fun. Very meta, right?

Useful resources:

• https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 — scary but mind opening
• https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca — really worth reading!
• https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-travel-sick.html
• https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/06/812650868/coronavirus-travel-tips-to-fly-or-not-to-fly-what-happens-if-you-cancel
• https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/03/how-coronavirus-caused-hug-and-handshake-hiatus/607762/
• https://www.iata.org/contentassets/f1163430bba94512a583eb6d6b24aa56/cabin-air-quality.pdf

Preparing to traveling during infectious times was originally published in Travel in the Times of Corona on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Data visualization is a key part in data science processes, and geographic data might seem a bit out-of-reach, as it’s not a simple X-Y axis configuration and this post is meant to help newbies and intermediate data-lovers get more out of their location data sets, with less effort and some useful guidance.

Geographic data and Location data — what are they?

Geographic data and location data are often used interchangeably. The terms relate to data sets that some of their features are geographic, or location-based. Geographic data (also known as geospatial data, or geodata in short) can have many faces, but generally speaking, it is a dataset with geographic component: be it a zip/postal code, address, country names, latitude and longitude or other location indicators. It can also come in many formats (databases, tabular data, shapefiles, raster data and more), and it might be worth reading more about if you’re completely novice to the area (take a look at esri’s definitions, as well as this easier to digest intro on GIS Geography.

In this article, we will focus on some basics, mostly around visualizing geodata with Python, and offer some code snippets for you to use as reference.

Python Libraries

When working with geodata in Python a few libraries can come in handy, depends on how deep you want to go and how complex is your data. A few main ones are pandas, geopandas, plotly, shapely and fiona. In this article we will mostly be using pandas and plotly, but in the coming ones, we will use other libraries as well.

Sample Data

As you might know, Kaggle is a great source for data sets (but I highly recommend taking on a few competitions on there for practice), and we’ll use an earthquake data set I found on there.

We start by loading the data, and converting the dates to the right format using pandas to_datetime:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv('database.csv')
df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date'], utc=True)

We won’t spend much time on exploring the dataframe itself, but as usual, we can just take a brief view of its content using the very useful:

print(df.describe())
print(df.head(5))
print(df.info())

We can see that the data here has two columns that describe its geographical content: latitude and longitude. These represent the data point location in angles on the globe (more info here). I’ll just point out that location can be described in different manners (lat/long just a very common one) and in different projections — and that’s an entire topic on it’s own!

Visualizing

After installing plotly, if it wasn’t already installed on your machine, you can start playing around with some basic but helpful visuals. The first we will inspect is scatter_geo.

scatter_geo

This is a plotly function that (as you might’ve guessed) plots geographic data as a scatter plot — meaning, markers on a map. This is a very simple and very high level of plotting map data, as it might lack some detail, but it can provide a very good general understanding, and might be sufficient when not trying to go too deep into geographical details.

The code above generates a scatter plot on a map, and opens it in a browser window (you can modify that by changing pio.renderers.default), while allowing you to interact with it — that’s the best part about plotly, if you ask me. See for yourself:

Neat eh? We can clearly see where tectonic plates are! We can make this visual a bit more handy if we add a dimension — let’s add color, to capture the more intense earthquakes.

fig = px.scatter_geo(df, lat = "Latitude", lon = "Longitude", color = 'Magnitude')
pio.show(fig)

We can filter our dataframe to only show earthquakes where the magnitude was over 7.5 Richter, and add the date they happened to the hover data available:

fig = px.scatter_geo(df[df.Magnitude >= 7.5], lat = "Latitude", lon = "Longitude", color = 'Magnitude', hover_data = ['date'])
pio.show(fig)

It’s important to note that all of the sample plots above are much more customizable. By typing ? px.geo_scatter you can get the full help on the function and how to use it (or simply check out plotly’s full documentation page — it’s quite helpful!). If you want to add another dimension — you can use size — that way, another numeric measure can be presented in a single geoscatter plot, represented by the size of the marker.

graph_objects

All of the above examples used one of plotly’s recent releases, known as plotly-express. However, plotly is a much more complex library than that, and is actually based on graph objects, that can still be used to even further customize your figures.

A graph object contains the data and the layout, or looks, of the figure. Here’s how we could create the same figure as before, with a graph object:

Clearly, this is a bit more code than the one-liners used by plotly-express, which might be a downside, but it also means that this is much more customizable. For example, by breaking down the markers into dictionary with different attributes, we can be much more specific on how we would like it visualized. We can also change the projection to show earth-like figure, edit the colors of land and ocean and more…

Another advantage using graph_objects is we can use subplots! It's a very basic requirement but at the time of writing this post, px still did not allow it, and it's important to know, as it's a very fundamental and helpful feature.

To create subplots with varying map set ups, we need to use plotly’s make_subplots, and add each map (or in fact, any of the plotly graph objects) as a separate trace, defining each on its own (or better yet, if they're easily related, with some iterative process).

Clearly, using graph objects gives much more freedom, but makes the code a bit less easy to generate. But with Google on your side, and community forums and Stackoverflow to help — you should not worry about it too much. If you have an idea, it can probably be achieved — just do the research!

Next article, we will look into another useful plotly plotting technique for geodata, using the mapbox engine, and more is coming soon. If you have any questions or requests, please feel free to shoot me a message or comment :)

Data Science with Location Data: Visualizations and Tools, Part 1 was originally published in That Data Guy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I decided to write this piece mostly for myself, to recap some things I learned and realized during TMLS2018, which helped me get my head around some basic facts and fictions around data science in general and machine learning in particular. Most significantly, I think this is where I gave myself the rubber stamp acknowledging this area is definitely where I would like to grow and evolve, and I can’t wait to get my hands dirty.

So, are you confused about what does the often-vague term ‘Data Scientist’ mean and what should you think about when considering a career step in such direction? Well, the next couple of paragraphs might clear some things out.

First, data science is a very, very broad area, and can include different types of work. To simplify, we can speak of at least 4–5 sub-roles under data science:

• Data Engineer — responsible for data sourcing — bringing the data in, cleaning it and handling it before it gets to the data scientists and others down the funnel.
• Data Scientist — the one who gets to fiddle around with the data and create models based on it. Sometimes this might include cleaning and fixing into databases, and often includes analysis of the data for better understanding of products and customers, and communication of results to the team and management.
• Business Analyst — the person responsible for the front-end of the data — visualization and insights — and the higher level understanding of the business itself and its clients.
• Research Scientist — takes part in fundamental ML research, as in, researching new approaches and develops new methods in the field.
• Machine Learning Engineer — responsible for the practical implementation of the models a data scientist may come up with, and possibly develop more ML models.

Keep in mind, you should take these with a grain of salt. These are generalizations and can differ significantly from one company to another, and sometimes a single person might be required to do almost all of the aspects mentioned above. But as the field of data science is growing and evolving, companies understand that there is just too much to do for a single person to handle.

Still in for the ride on the data scientist train? Perfecto.

Now comes up the question of how to get on it, if you are not coming from previous work in the field. This has (of course) a lot of variables, mostly your professional and educational background, but in general, you should probably pick up some of those skills:

• Methodology and terminology — what is a schema? what is a database? relational DBs? RDBMS? Learn the basics (might want to consider to take a look at some Coursera courses like this and this).
• Probability theory and statistics — these are essential parts of data science and machine learning in specific, and you better have some sort of understanding of it.
• Data tools and some basic programming — programming is essential like in so many other technical fields, sorry if you thought you can get by without. Lots of languages are being used today for data science purposes, but more and more companies rely on Python as the go-to. Mastering data processing or data management tools like SQL and R is going to be something you deal with on daily basis, so better pick up some of that as you go.
• Build your portfolio — data science can be an art, in a weird way, and like fellow designers and other artistic professions, having a portfolio is going to give you points. Start playing around with data sets online (Kaggle is fantastic for that), implement some of the things you learned and practice the different tools you used. Having something to show or link to is always more convincing that saying ‘I know python, I swear’.

Some of the skills I mentioned above are very basic and you probably have a grasp of them from your studies or work experience, but others are really important if you are switching to this field from something not directly related, like different areas of engineering for example, or general software development.

As you work your skills up, stay up-to-date with what’s happening in the field. Read some blog posts. Follow companies that you are interested in and understand their use of data. Go to meetups in your city. Interact with professionals from an early stage, and you might learn something on the path they went through, and who knows, maybe even get your foot in some company’s door!

As I stated in the beginning, I wrote this mostly to organize some thoughts and pieces of information I had in my head, and decided to share with the world. I hope you find even a small piece of it to be helpful! Feel free to let me know how do you feel and what do you think, I just love me some criticism ❤.

Data Scientist. What does it mean and how do you get in on it? was originally published in That Data Guy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.