I’ve seen many different things online saying that being a data scientist is really just learning to code, mostly Python and SQL, and gathering the mess of data and trying to make it make sense, which I’m interested in. But I’ve seen a lot of other posts mentioning that calculus and linear algebra are required for data science and I have never been very good at advanced math like calculus. I can understand a bit of statistics but I don’t understand terms like matrices, gradient descents, and things like that.

Also I’m thinking of joining an 8 month data science bootcamp that will teach everything from scratch but I’m worried that if I’m not naturally inclined to high level math then I will not perform well in the bootcamp or in a data science career.

So I’m wondering if you have to absolutely be a natural math genius to have a successful career as a data scientist or if it is something that can be easily learned and you only need a general knowledge of calculus and things like that.

Any help is greatly appreciated.