Jeremy Gu, San Francisco Bay Area Chapter Vice President

Speakers and ASA San Francisco Bay Area Chapter volunteers meet for a careers event in December. View more photos of the event.

The San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of ASA (SFASA) invited a group of panelists to speak December 7, 2017, about career development for data scientists, statisticians, and students interested in the careers of data science, machine learning, business analytics, and biostatistics. Speakers came from diverse backgrounds and provided the audience—made up of ASA members and the public—with guidance on various perspectives.

When the discussion began, each of the speakers gave a self-introduction and described how they started their career. Annette Molinaro, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, talked about how she decided to join academia. Deepak Agarwal, vice president of engineering at LinkedIn, shared his path toward artificial intelligence and recommendation systems after earning his PhD in statistics. Imola K. Fodor, deputy global head of oncology biostatistics for gRED and breast/GYN franchise of Genentech/Roche, and Tara Maddala, head of biostatistics and data management at GRAIL, discussed their interests in statistics and research when they were studying as undergrads. Finally, Brad Klingenberg, vice president of data science at Stitch Fix; Jizhou Fu, data science manager at Uber; and Anirban Biswajit Deb, data science manager at Uber, shared their experiences working as data science managers in fast-growing startups.

The questions raised by the audience concerned preparing for job interviews, applying to graduate schools, deciding between master’s degrees and PhD degrees, and gaining the qualifications of a data scientist in current job markets. The panel members addressed the importance of statistical knowledge in boosting their careers, advised how to be successful in a data science career, and described work challenges—such as time planning and business communication with nonstatisticians.

After the discussion, the speakers and audience members had about an hour to chat one-on-one.

The panel speakers and audience members agreed statistics is the foundation of data science and people cannot work effectively in data science without statistical skills.

Since 2015, SFASA has successfully hosted panel discussions about career development and plans are in place to continue in 2018.