I've been working as a data scientist for several years and have written some pretty gnarly looking SQL myself. I have a background in math and hard science so

I've been working as a data scientist for several years and have written some pretty gnarly looking SQL myself. I have a background in math and hard science so I have some understanding of the scientific method as well. While I respect our DBAs I wouldn't call any of them qualified to be data scientists. While I have been able to hold my own in this job I went back to school to pursue a graduate degree (partly) because being in the field has shown me how much more there is to know. While it's easy enough to train a simple model in R there are so many ways to fool yourself and produce an invalid analysis and so many variations on otherwise-simple problems. It seems this field has a lot of variation. A glorified report writer might get the DS title but they're not going to get the really cool jobs. If you're interested in data science try out a kaggle competition and try to place high. The variety of methods and tricks people try to improve their entries can be illuminating, I think.