statictica

I have a lower half sleeve on one arm plus a couple of other smaller tattoos on both arms and am actively knocking out my sleeve one piece at a time. I've never experienced a negative reaction to them by faculty, graduate students, or undergrads. If anything, I think the undergrads that I have taught previously tend to feel more comfortable around me because of them. I usually wear long-sleeve shirts around my department but have no problem walking around in a t-shirt as well. I've also taught in a t-shirt a few times due to the heat and had no problems. IMO, people who judge you because of your tattoos would judge you for something else even if you didn't have any ink. Tattoos just make it easier for people to judge you because they are easily visible, kind of like your skin color.

In graduate school, experience means conducting research and publishing. If your goal is to get into the data science field, you need to learn as many different methods and statistical programming languages as you possibly can. In addition, you need to be able to figure out which methods work best with he type of data your "clients" have. You talk about your skills and abilities but don't mention what they actually are. I'd encourage you to ask yourself the following and learn more about them: - What do you actually mean by "data analysis"? This is such a big term and means different things to different people. - Are you proficient in R, Python, SAS, Java, MATLAB, Perl? If not, you will have a hard time getting a data science job. Knowing one or more of the following is the single most important step you can take to try your luck in data science. - If yes, are you familiar with the data visualization, web scraping, big data, and machine learning frameworks within any of the above? If not, look into Python's NLTK, R's plotly, and the basic modeling code for any or all of the above to find one that you like and start coding away. - Are you actually good at statistical analysis? Knowing how to do social network analysis or exponential random graph models and being an expert in them are two very different things. Ask yourself why you want to get into data science in the first place. If you don't have a compelling reason to do so, you might want to look into something different. - Is a masters in sociology actually enough to compete with all the PhDs from various fields for these jobs? Places like the CDC hire data scientists from different fields depending on their research agenda, which means you will be competing with public health, sociology, political science, statistics, and applicants from other fields for a data analysis job. Most of these people have doctorate degrees, which means they have at leaast two to three times more research and data analysis experience than you do with an MA. Sorry to say, most places will hire recent PhDs over MAs any day. Anyway, hope this helps.