I recently gave to the Duke Big Data Initiative entitled Dr. Hopper, or How I Quit My Ph.D. and Learned to Love Data Science. The talk was well received, and my slides seemed to resonate in the Twitter data science community.
Here’s my favorite section from the talk:




I conclude by listing things I learned in school but don’t use every day:
- Linear Algebra
- Probability
- Statistics
- Machine Learning
- Math Modeling
- Data Structures
- Algorithms
- Distributed Systems
And things I wasn’t taught in school but use daily:
- Communication
- Careful Thought
- Prose Writing Skill
- Software Writing Skill
- Software Engineering
- Tenacity
- Stack Overflow