As someone working mostly independently in their first job out of grad school, what should I do to ensure I'm developing professionally?

Welcome to my life. This is basically my career. The first time I got a data science partner was 7 years into working as a data scientist. He had a degree from MIT, had decades of experience beyond me. It was going to be awesome!

Turned out he wasn't the brightest. The type of work we were doing he struggled at. We needed to know physics for it and he was lost step after step. Furthermore it was cutting edge, so we had months of just reading articles to figure things out. I loved working with him. He helped me with my work and I was radically non-judgmental and caring, helping him with his work, and we're still friends today. I love the culture when I get to be around other data scientists.

He had spent his entire career under others getting help from them. He'd compare me Srinivasa Ramanujan regularly, because I got into the industry when I was 17 and I invented a lot of my own vocabulary to describe what I was doing having taught myself it instead of learning from others.

It was a lot of fun.

To get a bit more serious, it is both wonderful and sucks being on your own. It's wonderful because you get to explore and learn so much stuff. You get to learn how to create a successful project end-to-end from finding better ways to getting labeled data, to finding better ways to deploy the models you write, and of course everything in between.

The downside is unknown unknowns. Anything that is a known unknown, you can google, read a book, take a class, or whatever you need to do to learn the topic. But for unknown unknowns, you just don't know what you're missing. This can cause anxiety and even imposter syndrome. How do you know when you're missing an obvious solution and are instead solving the problem in a convoluted way? You don't. And that is hard.

I recommend working on a group if you get the opportunity, but in the mean time you have the potential to level up and level up quickly if your work isn't overwhelming you. You have the opportunity to gain management and managing upward skills needed when you're a team of one. You have the opportunity to learn how to interact with the software engineers / data engineers / sales / marketing people, and so on, to help them. You have the opportunity to learn the whole stack. When working on a team you get that hand holding for you, and because of that learning is slower. If you can rock it, you're on an accelerated path.

And finally, if your projects succeed. At the end of the day that is what matters, even if you did end up solving it in a non-standard way from ignorance. That is okay. It's a bit more on the management side of things, but you might want to take the time to slowly read this. It will help guide you from beginning to end on your projects. If you ever feel stuck, this roadmap will help.

/r/datascience Thread