ATS. Applicant tracking system. Each data science job has 100s if not a thousand applicants. No employer in the right mind is paying anyone to filter out that many resumes. Key technical/ buzzwords increase your resume score. Education and Job history titles also boost your score. The biggest hurdle for data grads is getting past the resume filter, not the interview. Everyone keeps talking about kaggle projects, ATS software don't care about your impressive personal projects. No interviewer even gave a shit about my projects. All they ask me about was my internship and experience. A Masters increases your score ahead someone without a masters even if you both have the same experience and skills. That might put you over the cut off point. The key goal is to get to a stage where your resume is being read by human eyes.