Data scientist is becoming one of the hottest jobs. But “What is data science?” and “how to become a data scientist?” might be the first two questions you would like to ask. So, do I. Many engineering students I know is reshaping their career path towards data science. After taking the 8 courses offered by IBM on Coursera, I think I could answer above two questions.
In my opinion, data scientists (the word scientist makes it looks really fancy) are professionals who use data to obtain a solution to a problem (e.g. a business problem where to start a restaurant or an engineering problem how to optimize my design) and communicate their findings by making a good story. Data scientists may come from different backgrounds such as engineering, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and even sociology. Because in a digital era, we always have tons of data to work with. So, petroleum engineers, are you ready to do data science? In my case, I have been trained to become a petroleum engineer since college. But still, I think we petroleum engineers can work as data scientists. For example, we have a lot of production data from the field, such as well location, depth, wellhead pressure, bottomhole pressure, flow rate. And it would be great if we could use specialized tools such as SQL, Python to store, process, analyze and visualize the field data. And I think many petroleum engineers have been doing the job as data scientists for a long time, but they just did not realize that. For example, building a PVT model to match the experimental data or analyzing the history production data to predict future production. We can also combine these data with advanced yet accessible tools such as Machine learning/deep learning/ AI to achieve a lot of great things. I have learnt most of the fundamentals of data science, such as probability, statistics, linear algebra, and programming in the path of becoming a petroleum engineer. So, I found it is not as difficult as I thought to transform myself from PE to data scientist with self-learning. So, I would say I am ready for the embrace the change in this digital era, and I am also confident after finishing the 9 courses offered by IBM via Coursera in less than 2 months! At last, I would shout out to all petroleum engineers, “We can do it and we can do better!“
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For the past two months, I spent my free time to study the well-known online course offered by Andrew Ng via a Coursera.
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Ye TianA Ph.D. candidate in Petroleum Engineering at Colorado School of Mines Archives
September 2019
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