Big data are a big deal. No one knows that better than Jasmine Dumas, who started down her career path as an engineer where she was exposed to a glut of underused data in the manufacturing of medical equipment. Intrigued by the information she could mine from the data, she began investigating on her own—taking online and graduate courses, volunteering on projects, hunting down internships, participating in Google’s Summer of Code, and eventually creating her own programs.

Self-taught, passionate, creative, and hard-working Dumas parlayed this collection of experiences into a career in data science at Simple Finance, a digital banking service, where she now designs landing pages for non-technical users to engage with simple R programming tools.

Dumas is quick to note that everyone’s path into big data will be different, but she also dispels the common idea of the data scientist unicorn: a person who has a unique—and difficult to attain—set of skills. Whether you are self-taught or in a newly launched college program, no single path is the right one.

To learn more, check out our live-tweet of the event @URI_CoastalInst

The “Careers in R” speaker series  is co-hosted by the URI Coastal Institute and RhodyRStats, the group that makes programming “R” fun.