It was a statistics class where I learned a linear time median algorithm. But that was pretty lucky, I admit. 95% of undergraduate statistics education is focu

It was a statistics class where I learned a linear time median algorithm. But that was pretty lucky, I admit. 95% of undergraduate statistics education is focused on formal inference. Data science, in my experience, involves a lot more exploratory data analysis [1] than formal inference (frequentist or Bayesian). The extreme focus on inference and the hypothesis testing step in the scientific method is something people with a formal statistics education have to overcome to be productive data scientists. Or applied statisticians, really! It is more important to understand the data, organize it creatively, and find unexpected structure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratory_data_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratory_data_analysis