Ask HN: Quarter-life crisis

What draws you to data visualization? Is it the sorcerer's apprentice type visceral appeal of creating meaning out of seemingly entropic data? Or is it you like the data visualization aspect more than the political campaign/marketing of your business.

Reading between the lines, it seems you are comfortable (and doing fairly well) bringing data visualization to small political campaigns - do you want to expand that ambition? (e.g. in charge of real-time analytics for a large political campaign). Or do you feel like you want to tell people at cocktail parties that you are a data scientist? What would your dream job as a data scientist be? Do you want to be in a position where your job is access to huge data sets (Google, Facebook, Twitter) - for the ego and boasting of it? What do you think of OKCupid's data analysis/data visualization blog on dating - do you want to explore hypotheses and test them on large data sets? Is Edward Tufte's book(s) a coffee table book or do you flip through it when you are bored? You don't have his books? Did you want to enter the Netflix Prize contest but felt you didn't have the skills to compete?

I've met some biostatisticians. It's hard to figure out what the heck they are talking about - but they really do enjoy their job (providing quantifiable evidence of drug efficacy).

I've also met some actuaries. They get paid a lot. It's a very secure career. It's all numbers.

Some of the best visualizations are not that complex.

http://twistori.com http://twittervision.com

There is a $$ rather expensive test called the Kolbe test that you may consider investing in taking - it goes way beyond Myers Briggs to pinpoint your personal strengths and how you feel about them.

http://www.kolbe.com

Also, when you say computational scientist, do you want to go into something specific? Computational political science? Computational biology? Theoretical computer science?

Programming is usually something that bright people can pick up on their own, with the help of online tutorials and books. It seems like you've already started. If you want to go into something that requires domain-specific knowledge, you might consider doing a second master's - depending on the subject, your school may not require a specific undergraduate degree to get in, and in my experience you learn a lot more working with an advisor one on one vs. learning in large class settings. Also, two years instead of four.

complete MIT OpenCourse, "6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", come back and tell us how you went ~ http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

That's how I taught myself most of my programming related knowledge.

Good luck.