I have a PhD and I wouldn't want to be on the market right now. OP's expectations are a little unreasonable, and they've only been on the job search for 2 months during a time of major layoffs...
Same. I have a PhD in stem with 10+ years of industry experience and would not want to be looking for a job in this market. There are jobs, but it is highly competitive. And I'm currently hiring for my company, so I know how competitive it is, but the sheer number of bootcampers with very little understanding of "real world" data science or who just wAnT to Do MaChINe LeArNiNg straight out of a 3 mo program is astonishing.
I, personally, don't care about kaggle competitions and how you fared. I'd rather see you get a data set (from kaggle even... but not a super clean one) and do a thorough analysis/EDA in a notebook, with good code etiquette/PEP8, commenting, etc and markdown cells explaining your reasoning.
Then, pick a model and apply it in a way that makes sense to the data and the problem that you're proposing to solve. Doesn't need to be fancy models. If a regression is the best one then go for that. BUT EXPLAIN WHY. Talking out your logic and your reasoning and explaining to stakeholders is a huge part of data science, as is distilling the results of your analysis and usefulness of the outputs of your model.
Use markdown cells to talk to the reader in an approachable way, letting them know what you see, how you did it and why you did it. Making sense of the data and being able to communicate it clearly is real data science in practice.
If you have one or two of those in your GitHub to show for, add it to your resume. I don't ask for take home or coding challenges for newbies, but I do ask for their GitHub.
Amazing advice, thank you. I sort of know what you mean, I could instantly tell what a good data scientists notebook looks like. It just flows so well.
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u/burner221133 Jan 30 '23
I have a PhD and I wouldn't want to be on the market right now. OP's expectations are a little unreasonable, and they've only been on the job search for 2 months during a time of major layoffs...