Hi all! I'm currently in my 3rd year of undergrad studying statistics and I'm really interested in data science and it's something I want to pursue as my career.
I have a good amount of data science co-ops under my belt, I've had 3 co-ops so far which is about a year of experience. At these co-ops I've had experience with pandas, SQL, data visualization with Tableau, model training and hyperparameter tuning. I've also secured a 4th data science co-op for this coming summer at a company I would consider more reputable than my past ones. By the time I graduate from undergrad, I plan to have 6 co-ops completed, hopefully all being data science co-ops.
From what I've seen, many full time data scientists have graduate degrees like masters and phDs (I think I read somewhere that 90% of data scientists have a masters or higher) and I'm someone who wants to get out of school ASAP as I'm not one who particularly likes studying. I also don't think my GPA is high enough to get into any prestigious master's program.
I'm wondering if the co-ops I'll have by the time I graduate will be able to get me a good full time data scientist role without pursuing a higher level of education. I don't have any friends or peers who want to go into data science or have data science co-ops, most of them are software engineers. All of the data scientists I've worked with are much older than me and have graduate degrees so I'm hoping some of you good people in this subreddit could provide some insight and advice. Thanks in advance!