Good to hear the program is going well now. Let me know if you wanna meet up in SF sometime for coffee etc. I'm at Yammer (Market and 9th area).

Bump for this interesting thread.

Greeksquared would be cool to get an update on how things are progressing for you.

Also a question, sorry for the derail but seems like a good place. For someone who is currently learning programming and taking free math courses online with a non-technical undergrad - what would be the best path to the same ends?

I am hoping to become a strong enough developer for a junior dev job soon and build some experience before taking a Masters CS bridging program. I guess afterwards getting into a bootcamp would be the goal. Really blurry about the connections of the paths at that point.

Thanks and good luck

I have cross-posted this thread on the twoplustwo for actuaries here -http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/showthread.php?t=276134

Theres quite a bit more goodies in there. I am officially finished with Zipfian and am now in full study mode right now. This includes completing projects for potential employers, studying old material, learning new material, adding on to my personal projects, studying quirky interview questions and connecting to people in the know.

I've been successful at getting interviews and equally successful at getting rejected. I think I've had at least a phone screening with 9 different companies and have been rejected by 6 of them. I actually just got back from an on-site interview with a company that would not be my top choice and they don't do much data science but there is some time-series which is a step up from my las t job as an analyst. I'd also be shocked if they did not offer me the position so hopefully I can get something on the scoreboard by next week. Data science interviews are not easy and there is an incredible amount of material that needs to be held in memory so it will take loads of studying to solidify it all. Apparently, the average number of companies it takes a Zipfian graduate to interview with to find work is 20. I was feeling extreme rage upon my rejections as its no fun to get denied but I really am not prepared at the level I want to be so the rejections are pretty justified.

I was very skeptical of Zipfian gradutes being able to be placed before attending but not anymore. At least not for me. Another student got quite a nice paying job at a startup with some equity before we graduated. That was very comforting to see. I think just about all of us are getting good leads on interviews so the demand is there.

My final project was on event detection in online news articles and can be found here - www.newventify.com. I also made some upgrades to my poker AI thanks to bootstrap (www.gametheoryoptimalpoker.com). So I've got 2 decent portfolio projects for employers to see.

Somnius, I can't really help you out much with the given info but for me, I took as many data science (and a few programming) moocs as I could swallow. Its probably a good idea to spend some time building out a curriculum on paper. This will save you time from randomly going to the candy store. The only web dev bootcamp that I know that has verified results is Hack Reactor. I'm sure there are other good ones but their results are quite striking.

Thanks for the update.

My curiosity was mainly focused on that pivot point that's likely difficult to pinpoint anyways. From the listings I've been browsing, many start-ups mention a relevant Master's and usually in CS. With a high level and hybrid discipline though it probably doesn't matter all that much - still seems like packing on as much as possible can only help at the point you're at, especially when there are apparently an abundance of PhD's kicking for Machine Learning jobs.

Bootcamps for web dev aren't really necessary - getting Junior Python jobs etc is pretty direct.

Will follow your updates at AO.

GL with the projects and the rest of your interviews.

At the beginning of this thread, I was going to say that you should just take one more exam and get your ASA, then you should be able to make 115K no problem. It looks like you took the other route and it worked well. Good luck in the job hunt.

I would have most likely attained my ASA by now if I had continually pursued it the last 8 months since the start of this thread. The 115k on the other hand would have likely not been possible. According to the salary survey linked in the OP the 10th - 90th percentile for a health actuary with an ASA with 3 - 5 years experience is 77k - 118k so I probably would have been at least a couple years away from getting 100k+.

Good news. I have an offer in the works here in Houston as a data scientist. When upper management gets back from vacation and hopefully it gets approved I'll find out what it is. The offer is in Houston so the salary is going to be quite a bit less than the bay area but I'm hoping for 90k+.

I made it to a final round for a startup in the bay area but had to turn it down. This was after working on a project for them for 15 hours and a one hour phone interview. But with my family (which contains a young child and another on the way) its just not the best move for us at the time. It would have been really fantastic for my career to be in the bay area with this mega explosion of data science and startup ferver and zipfian friends and more vacation and non-corporate perks and flat organizations etc...

I have made some good connections within the Houston community and have gone to some meetups and met some entrepreneurial types so there is a scene that exists out here and all is not lost.

Since I haven't signed anything I'm still interviewing (but only in Houston/Austin/Dallas) and actually hope to get another offer to get some leverage if my current offer is low.

Hey Greeksquared,

nice thread. It's nice to hear about people's paths into getting a career they want to get into. I've been pursuing an actuarial career after I graduated in 2013 but couldn't find anything so I decided to go into grad school in applied mathematics. I still have not found an actuarial internship and I'm afraid that the season that they hiring has passed. Thinking about going into a datascientist role or something else.. #onthatstrugglebus

Yes, entry level actuarial jobs can be excruciatingly difficult to get. I got rejected more than 10 times with 4 exams and a masters degree.

So I've been a data scientist for a couple weeks now and have done only about a day's worth of actual work. The department is still brand new and projects are just getting started. I still think we are a couple weeks away from getting more work. This is actually all good news as I have basically been tearing through multiple MOOC's that will help me considerably in the future.

My only real assignment has been to search free text for a specific failed part. A consulting firm has attempted this problem with pretty poor results. They used no semantic/sentiment analysis and simply used the number of part mentions as their only feature in their models. I did a very quick sentiment analysis and seemed to have surpassed their results. I only have a very rudimentary introduction to NLP but I think this problem should be pretty easy to get very high accuracy given that generally the total number of different parts even mentioned in the text is usually around 2-3.

I'm just starting to go through stanford's NLP course which should hopefully give me the necessary means of connecting 'fail' words to part names through parsing libraries. Identifying the failed part should be easy from there.

Also, salary was lower than expected (82k) but I got one of the very few jobs in Houston with the title data scientist so I can't complain. If I really cared about salary, I could just change jobs in the next 6 - 18 months. I have been contacted out of the blue by many recruiters (even facebook and netflix) and had absolutely no problem getting first round interviews. I haven't updated my linkedin profile yet so I imagine the amount of drooling should increase substantially once I update it.

awesome good to hear things are progressing. can you go into a bit more detail about the nature of the work you're doing?

and for your day's entertainment - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8b4xYbEugo