Absolutely realistic, though it helps to have good intuition about math. I've seen smart people without data science experience make the leap after a 12 week b

Absolutely realistic, though it helps to have good intuition about math. I've seen smart people without data science experience make the leap after a 12 week boot camp, or finishing the Johns Hopkins Coursera certificate. If you're good at picking stuff up online, the latter is probably the best start. There is such a shortage of data scientists that most companies will settle for 2 out of 3 of the trinity of Stats, Programming and Domain Knowledge. If the candidate is smart enough, sometimes 1 out of 3 is enough.