From my experience, you will spend most your time finding, collecting and cleaning data. Doing anything super algorithmically interesting will be rare. Get fa

From my experience, you will spend most your time finding, collecting and cleaning data. Doing anything super algorithmically interesting will be rare. Get familiar with the Unix shell + Python (or similar language). The shell will save you tons of code. awk/sed/cut and friends are very fast for cleaning data (in development time and runtime). And shell scripts are good for grabbing things from different systems.