For qn (1) yes and no depending on the employer. for jobs in the public sector, honours definitely affects starting pay from what I’ve heard.
for qn (2), also yes and no, depending on whether you want to actually become a data analyst in media/creative industry, even then you don’t need a minor in arts. I majored in science and I started in the fashion industry.
Currently in tech doing data analytics, so if you are serious about going into data analytics/science work, I recommend you to focus on the technical skills like SQL, Python, Excel/Sheets and Powerpoint/Slides. There’s no need to fret too much about GPA or which courses. The caveat is you must have enough side or personal projects or internships to actually showcase you really do know your stuff, otherwise GPA becomes the only indicator and a bad GPA will set you back at the starting line. Anyway, GPA becomes useless after your first job.
Why are the skills important you might ask?
SQL - extract data + clean data
Python - clean data + automate pipeline
Powerpoint / Google slides - present + communicate data
Excel / Google sheets - share data to business users
Mathematics and Statistics - challenge your data and assumptions (since you’re alr in a math program you shld alr have this by default)
This is the minimum requirement for a data analyst. If we’re talking about data scientist, then one would also need to know how to properly formulate business problems, scope the solution, ML concepts to understand the tradeoffs between models, select the right one and finetune features/hyperparameters, cloud platforms like AWS for CI/CD and some data structures as well for scale and speed of delivery.
For qn (1) yes and no depending on the employer. for jobs in the public sector, honours definitely affects starting pay from what I’ve heard.
for qn (2), also yes and no, depending on whether you want to actually become a data analyst in media/creative industry, even then you don’t need a minor in arts. I majored in science and I started in the fashion industry.
Currently in tech doing data analytics, so if you are serious about going into data analytics/science work, I recommend you to focus on the technical skills like SQL, Python, Excel/Sheets and Powerpoint/Slides. There’s no need to fret too much about GPA or which courses. The caveat is you must have enough side or personal projects or internships to actually showcase you really do know your stuff, otherwise GPA becomes the only indicator and a bad GPA will set you back at the starting line. Anyway, GPA becomes useless after your first job.
Why are the skills important you might ask?
SQL - extract data + clean data
Python - clean data + automate pipeline
Powerpoint / Google slides - present + communicate data
Excel / Google sheets - share data to business users
Mathematics and Statistics - challenge your data and assumptions (since you’re alr in a math program you shld alr have this by default)
This is the minimum requirement for a data analyst. If we’re talking about data scientist, then one would also need to know how to properly formulate business problems, scope the solution, ML concepts to understand the tradeoffs between models, select the right one and finetune features/hyperparameters, cloud platforms like AWS for CI/CD and some data structures as well for scale and speed of delivery.