 We'll come back to data science and introduction and we're going to begin this course by defining data science that makes sense But we're going to do it in kind of a funny way The first thing I'm going to talk about is the demand for data science. So let's take a quick look now Data science can be defined in a few ways. I'm going to give you some short definitions Take one on my definition is that data science is coding math and statistics in applied settings That's a reasonable working definition But if you want to be a little more concise I've got take two on a definition that data science is the analysis of diverse data or Data that you didn't think would fit into standard analytic approaches a Third way to think about it is that data science is inclusive analysis It includes all of the data all of the information that you have in order to get the most Insightful and compelling answer to your research questions Now you may say yourself wait That's it. Well, if you're not impressed, let me show you a few things first off Let's take a look at this article This is data scientists the sexiest job of the 21st century and please note that this is coming from Harvard business review So this is an authoritative source and it's the official source of this saying that data science is sexy Yeah, again, you may be saying to yourself Sexy I hardly think so. Oh, oh, yeah It's sexy and the reason data science is sexy is because first it has rare qualities and Second it has high demand. Let me say a little more about those The rare qualities are that data science takes unstructured data than finds order meaning and value in the data Those are important, but they're not easy to come across Second high demand. Well, the reason it's in high demand is because data science provides insight into what's going on around you and critically it provides a competitive Advantage, which is a huge thing in business settings Now, let me go back and say a little more about Demand, let's take a look at a few other sources. So for instance, the McKinsey Global Institute Published a very well-known paper and you can get at it with this URL And if you go to that web page, this is what's going to come up And we're going to take a quick look at this one the executive summary it's a PDF that you can download And if you open that up, you'll find this page and let's take a look at the bottom right corner Two numbers here. I'm going to zoom in on those The first one is they are projecting a need in the next few years for somewhere between 140 and 190,000 deep analytical talent positions. So this means actual Practicing data scientists. That's a huge number But almost 10 times as high is 1.5 million more data savvy managers will be needed to take full advantage of big data in the United States Now that's people who aren't necessarily doing the analysis but have to understand it who have to speak data And that's one of the main purposes of this particular course Is to help people who may or may not be the practicing data scientists Learn to understand what they can get out of data and some of the methods used to get there Let's take a look at another article from linkedin Here's a shortcut URL for it and that will bring you to this web page the 25 hottest job skills that got people hired in 2014 And take a look at number one here statistical analysis and data mining very closely related to data science And just to be clear this was number one in australia and brazil and canada and france and india In the netherlands in south africa and the united arab emirates in the united kingdom everywhere And if you need a little more let's take a look at glass door which published an article this year 2016 And it's about the 25 best jobs in america And look at number one right here. It's data scientists and we can zoom in on this information It says there's going to be 1700 job openings with a median based salary of over 116,000 And fabulous career opportunities and job scores So if you want to take all of this together the conclusion you can reach is that data science pays And I can show you a little more about that So for instance, here's the list of the top 10 highest paying salaries that I got from us news We have physicians or doctors dentists and lawyers and so on Now if we add data scientists to this list using data from o'reilly.com We have to push things around the side and it goes in third with an average Total salary not the base that we had in the other one, but the total compensation Of about 144,000 a year. That's extraordinary so In sum what do we get from all of this first off? We learned that there is a very high demand for data science Second we learned that there is a critical need for both specialists Those are the sort of practicing data scientists And for generalists people who speak the language and know what can be done And of course, there's excellent pay and all together This makes data science a compelling career alternative and a way of making you better at whatever you're doing