Thank you to everyone who responded to last week’s poll: What Field of Expertise Do You Study or Work In? At the time I’m writing this, there were 326 responses. While I knew all of you came from lots of different fields, I was surprised by how diverse this group really is, which made me really happy.
Here are the results. I tried to extract some of the “Other” responses from the comments and placed them into new categories.
If you didn’t get a chance to put in your response, I’d still be interested to see what you study or do for a living in the comments.
Math. I really enjoy the graphs.
Dear Nathan,
I think a pie chart would be more appropriate for this data. :p
Hadley
I didn’t respond to the initial survey because i couldn’t figure out how to describe what i do. I work at present for a company that does Internet radio. I write code, calculate metrics, mine data, etc. It seems presumptuous to say that i’m a statistician or computer scientist. I used to design software tools for the consumer product formulation industry, and i find that my current job is a lot like that of a formulator– trying out new recipes to see what works better.
I did answer in the comments section, but I think a category of “data analysis” or “analytics” would catch folks like Mike (from comments above) and myself
Academic Study: Computer Science
Work in: Business / Retail
Hard to say any one thing, as we studied X, transitioned to work at some company that does Y, but the job we do is Z. Career path flow chart anyone? Yay!
@Mike, Sara: maybe a title like “data scientist” would suffice :)
@Mike I am in the same position. What you do is kind of like what I want to do. I guess “Complexity applied to Web Mining and Analytics” for me. Technically, I am in Statistics and Computer Science on paper.
A bit surprised at the Computer Science tally, but they are probably more likely to read blogs (?). Design doesn’t surprise me at all. Surprised IS wasn’t more represented.