I am wondering what the duties of a Data Scientist are as well as what level of education is needed for this kind of job position. I am on the hunt to find an option where I can work from home at least 50% of the time. I know I will need to better my education in the process for this so I want to go at it prepared and be sure my education choices won't go to waste.
Data Scientists are typically finding new ways to build analysis on data that already exists in the public domain. For example, you might write a Python or R application to go out and grab all of the tweets relevant to an industry or target market. Bring the data back into a local data storage location then determine characteristics about the tweet authors such as the best time of day to advertise, which age range, favorable geographical locations, etc. Political campaigns have made heavy use of this sort of analysis.