Networking is the most valuable career advancement skill in data science. And yet, almost paradoxically, most data scientists don’t spend any time on it at all. In some ways, that’s not terribly surprising: data science is a pretty technical field, and technical people often prefer not to go out of their way to seek social interactions. We tend to think of networking with other “primates who code” as a distraction at best, and an anxiety-inducing nightmare at worst.

So how can data scientists overcome that anxiety, and tap into the value of network-building, and develop a brand for themselves in the data science community? That’s the question that brings us to this episode of the podcast. To answer it, I spoke with repeat guest Sanyam Bhutani — a top Kaggler, host of the Chai Time Data Science Show, Machine Learning Engineer and AI Content Creator at H2O.ai, about the unorthodox networking strategies that he’s leveraged to become a fixture in the machine learning community, and to land his current role.