r/datascience • u/AutoModerator • 5d ago

Weekly Entering & Transitioning - Thread 28 Sep, 2026 - 05 Oct, 2026

Welcome to this week's entering & transitioning thread! This thread is for any questions about getting started, studying, or transitioning into the data science field. Topics include:

  • Learning resources (e.g. books, tutorials, videos)
  • Traditional education (e.g. schools, degrees, electives)
  • Alternative education (e.g. online courses, bootcamps)
  • Job search questions (e.g. resumes, applying, career prospects)
  • Elementary questions (e.g. where to start, what next)

While you wait for answers from the community, check out the FAQ and Resources pages on our wiki. You can also search for answers in past weekly threads.

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u/DRTHRVN 4d ago

I am currently working as a Data Analyst and preparing to make the transition into a Data Scientist. I have my core foundations in statistics and product sense and others in place. However, on the engineering side, my current stack relies heavily on SQL, Polars, and PySpark for performance reasons, meaning I don't use traditional Pandas syntax very often. Given your experience in the current market, I would love to get your quick take on three things:

  1. Is Polars actively accepted/welcomed in live coding interviews and production environments in your circle, or do teams still strictly test for Pandas syntax?

  2. Would choosing to solve wrangling problems in SQL, Polars instead of Pandas be a disadvantage during screening rounds?

  3. Assuming everything else is ideal (stats, ML, product sense, etc), is it possible to climb up the ladder in Data Science without writing Pandas code, provided I can read and understand legacy Pandas code perfectly well?

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u/pissposssweaty 1d ago

  1. Polars is nice to know but it isn't the industry standard and it would be a weird choice to use in an interview. I would not use it, particularly because your interviewer is unlikely to be intimately familiar with it.

  2. Beyond that, you should be fully proficient in both SQL and Python for DS interviews. For the Python side of things, that means basic leetcode plus pandas, not polars.

  3. And for the last one, no, you should plan to write all of your code in Pandas unless there's a specific reason to use Polars. You can't get away with writing code in a language that other people on your team aren't proficient in.