Sunny was an Economics and International Relations double major and Mathematics minor. Currently, she’s working as a data scientist at LinkedIn. Sunny’s in charge of analyzing large-scale structured and unstructured data to deliver product-related data insights. She’s also responsible for conducting rigorous causal analysis and developing causal methodology and machine learning models to drive business impact.

Sunny doesn’t have a typical workday. Every day is a bit different, depending on the projects she’s working on. She’s on-call for 2 weeks every quarter, during which time she deals with ad-hoc requests. Sunny spends the rest of the time going through design reviews of her project, communicating with different stakeholders, mostly on executing the project. Thus, her job requires strong communication, leadership, and execution skills. Other than that, hard skills on the job include SQL, R, Python, Hadoop (pig/hive/spark), and Java.

Her advice for students who want to pursue data science is to learn about what the job really means, set aside the hot demand for it and make sure this is what interests them. Especially, be sure to acquire the soft and hard skills listed above, and try to get as much relevant experience as possible.