One question I’ve been getting a lot lately is whether graduate degrees — especially PhDs — are necessary in order to land a job in data science. Of course, education requirements vary widely from company to company, which is why I think the most informative answers to this question tend to come not from recruiters or hiring managers, but from data scientists with those fancy degrees, who can speak to whether they were actually useful.

That’s far from the only reason I wanted to sit down with Rachael Tatman for this episode of the podcast though. In addition to holding a PhD in computational sociolinguistics, Rachael is a data scientist at Kaggle, and a popular livestreaming coder (check out her Twitch stream here). She’s has a lot of great insights about breaking into data science, how to get the most out of Kaggle, the future of NLP, and yes, the value of graduate degrees for data science roles.