Data Career Insights: The value of curiosity and how to cultivate a curious mind

What do data science managers look for when hiring? After years of listening to data professionals answer this question at the Data Science Hangout, I can tell you that it’s not just coding skills or statistics. It’s curiosity.

Brad Zielke, Senior Director of Data Science at Target, said, “I’d say the biggest thing, regardless of what’s on the resume or experience, is just the curiosity and willingness to go experiment and do these things.” He says he’s looking for a candidate’s “willingness to learn, to dive in with curiosity, build and connect, and work with peers.“ He’s also assessing their “ability to to be curious and then reach out to people and work with others and pull in diverse perspectives.” Brad’s take is here.

Ning Leng, Global Head of Data Science Acceleration at Genentech, told us, “For junior roles, especially when we hire master grads, we don’t really look into specific specialties. What we’re looking into is more curiosity and the ability to learn, collaboration skills, etcetera.” You can hear her talk about it here.

You were born curious. When you were a little kid, you likely asked a ton of questions… so many questions that the adults around you began to wish you’d stop. By the time you reached middle school, you might have realized that school was more about knowing facts and less about asking curious, probing questions that took up class time. 

As the years passed, your curiosity might have been further dampened by practicality, time constraints, stress, and negative social feedback. You still have it in you, even if it’s buried beneath a pragmatic adult facade, and you can work on uncovering it.

Curiosity is the spark that drives us to learn. Here are four ways to bring it back into your life:

• Make time for learning, exploring, and discussing
• Allow yourself to wonder why
• Ask good questions
• Think and speak like an experimenter

Make time for learning, exploring, and discussing.

One of the best ways to shift your brain into curiosity mode is to prioritize learning in your everyday life. Reading books and articles, listening to podcasts, watching videos, attending conference talks, and engaging in discussions with others can all help you engage with your curious side. What interests you? Joining communities and participating in discussions is also a great way to surround yourself with inquisitive people. Curiosity is contagious.

Be kind to yourself. It’s difficult to carve out time and actually enjoy learning when we’re overly stressed, exhausted, or sad. Finding more balance in your life might help you rediscover that desire to explore, so prioritize your wellbeing and curiosity will follow once you’re feeling better.

Allow yourself to wonder why.

Try to let yourself wonder about things without worrying whether it’s productive to do so. Keep a notebook of things you’re curious about now, and try to think about what fascinated you as a kid. Do you have some unanswered childhood questions you could tackle? If you’ve been shut down many times over your life, you might have some internalized negative voices telling you not to “bother” people with questions. It might take work to confront those voices and help them see you’re not a kid anymore, but it’s worth it.

Ask good questions.

A good question is one that helps you understand something on a deeper level, addresses a single topic, and makes sense in the context of the conversation. Curiosity is asking because you want to know more than what’s on the surface. 

Alex Gold, Director of Solutions Engineering and Support at Posit, says he looks for whether a candidate is asking good questions in an interview. “Are they asking questions that are way off-topic and it’s clear that they haven’t understood what we’re doing here, or are they asking questions that really get to the heart of the work? That, to me, is really important.” He says curiosity is “something that I select for really heavily in hiring, and I think it is crucial for solutions engineering and also for data scientists.” Listen to Alex talk about it here.

Asking “why” and “how” questions can help you understand a process or a mechanism better, but I’d recommend swapping your “why” for a “what” most of the time to avoid sounding accusatory. Instead of asking someone, “Why did you do it that way,” try asking something like, “What did you learn during the course of the project that led you to do it in that way?” There is a difference between curiosity and interrogation, and it’s all in how you ask things.

Think and speak like an experimenter.

Acting on your curiosity means taking some risks and adopting an experimental mindset. This might mean talking to your leadership and teammates about when it’s a good idea to experiment versus not. It also means getting comfortable with uncertainty and admitting you don’t know things. It’s pretty hard to be curious if you’re pretending like you know everything already, for fear someone will think you’re stupid. Get comfy saying things like, “I’ve never heard of that. How interesting! I’d love to hear more about how that works.” 

Remember when you were in middle school and you pretended to know about that popular band because you were afraid the other kids might think you were uncool if they realized you didn’t know? (No? Just me?) Turns out, the coolest thing you can do is just admit you don’t know and ask them to tell you all about it. Bonus: people love talking about the things that interest them!

How you talk about yourself matters. Many of us say we embrace and welcome failure, and that failure is a step in succeeding, but it can be tough to actually put that into practice. If you say you invite failure in yourself and others and then beat yourself up about your own failures, you may want to think about what that communicates to the people around you. Try speaking positively about your own failures and reframing them as experiments and learning ventures.

Could asking so many questions come across as bothersome?

As long as you’re asking good questions, I don’t think so, and I’ve heard other data people say the same. Alice Walsh, Head of Data at Synthesize Bio, described her experience: “I can’t think of a time, to be honest, where [my inquisitiveness] was necessarily misinterpreted. I think I’ve been very fortunate to work in research settings where curiosity is rewarded and people are also very accepting of you asking questions. If I don’t know something, I’ll ask.” 

Alice also said she respects curiosity in other people, especially in leaders, “people who know what they know and are comfortable with what they don’t know.” As mentioned above, getting comfortable publicly saying you don’t know something is step 0 of being open to curiosity, and really, what a power move. Hear Alice talk about it here.

Jamie Warner’s experience with asking her fellow managers for more information has been similarly positive: “I have almost never had a peer across the business, turn me down when I say, ‘I really want my people to understand this better because I want them to be able to make the best outcome for you, and I feel like we don’t understand what you do effectively.’ They’re always going to agree that we don’t understand what they do.” Hear Jamie’s perspective here.

Curiosity doesn’t just get you hired, it’s how you grow and flourish in your data career.

Don’t stop at the interview. Being curious is a lifelong practice, not merely a technique for getting hired. In fact, many data professionals will tell you that following their curiosity has gotten them everywhere. Oscar Baruffa, a Senior Analytics Manager at IDH at the time, said, “actually, most of my career development has been from just the bits that I was curious about that I couldn’t explain to someone exactly what was the ROI on this thing going to be.” That means trusting that following your curiosity will often lead to good things, even if you can’t explain why or how or when. You can listen to Oscar here.

Benedikt Kahmen, a Head of Analytics, Data & AI at Generali Deutschland AG, really struck a chord with me when he shared that his PhD studies were “always driven by curiosity.” He said, “I think that’s one of the central values, that’s the quality of life of data scientists in their daily work.” Read that again. Curiosity is related to the quality of life for data scientists in their daily work. I think back to the jobs in which I was the happiest, and I can absolutely confirm that they allowed me the scope to chase and satisfy my curiosity on a weekly basis. Can you relate? Benedikt talks about it here.

Don’t just be a data scientist.

I can’t say it better than Matt Frazier, the former Chief Analytics Officer at Pie Insurance, so I’ll leave it to him: “It is critically important for you to show in any interview, or to any business manager, that you have a high level of curiosity in the business that you’re in. Don’t sell yourself short and just be a data scientist. You need to be a curious data scientist. If it’s an insurance [company], you need to want to learn insurance. If it’s in Aeronautics, you need to want to learn aeronautics. If it’s in process optimization for- I don’t know, making candy bars – you need to really be curious and interested in what the process looks like to make a candy bar, right? I think that that’s really, really important is that data scientists can’t just be data scientists. They have to be renaissance people, and constantly curious, and autodidactic.” You can listen to Matt here.

Curious about curiosity? Here are some books that explore the topic.

Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It by Ian Leslie

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger

Want to get the chance to ask data science leaders your own curious questions?

Of course, you do! And we want you to join us. The Data Science Hangout is a live call every Thursday at 12pm Eastern. There’s no set agenda, no PowerPoint slides, just a big group of friendly data people powering a discussion with a different data leader each week. Past guests have included data world stars like Wes McKinney (co-creator of pandas), Julie Silge (co-author of many tidy modeling books and packages), and Hadley Wickham (of tidyverse fame). Add it to your calendar (big blue button) and view upcoming guests here.

Who is the Data Science Hangout for?

• People who want to solve problems with data
• People who use code of any language to work with data, or aspire to learn to code
• People who work on or with data teams, lead data teams, or aspire to join data teams
• People who appreciate a warm, welcoming environment and want to make Thursdays their favorite day of the week 😎

We’ll see you there!