Interview: I’m not sure if I faked it but I was definitely trying to appear more confident in myself than I was. Overall I would say the interview process was annoying. No HR call, first interview with the manager, then she told me I would likely move on to the next panel of interviews. They scheduled me for 4 more interviews in one day (I called off my previous job I was in to do this). They were with my manager’s manager, a senior VP for the overarching department, and the head of that department. They were actually very conversational. I think they mostly wanted to make sure I could make conversation and talk about my school work in a way that made sense.

The job is mostly what I thought it was going to be, except for the part about DS platform issues because the company I’m at is a large one, but not extremely advanced when it comes to tech.

Money and free time are my motivators. I would say I value my time more than money, and this job is a huge improvement to my previous hourly hospital job when it comes to time. I got 95k to start. My bachelors is in medical lab science and then I got a master’s in DS while working. I think my current manager was impressed by this during my interview.

Advice I would say is: be able to connect your previous experiences to this field. Data science and stats are everywhere. If you can, I would try and make a project in school relate to DS in some way and be able to explain that to employers. Stats and marketing is the perfect background tbh. The lack of a graduate degree may be the only thing that will slow you down in the search.