Data Science or Cyber Security?

My first question at the beginning of my study. My partner company which pays for my study wants to know which specialisation I want to choose.

For me it was a really hard question. I’m interessted in Cyber Security and I’m interessted in Data Science. Both specialisations are incredibly important in 2021 and both are growing so fast.

So what to choose?

I started collecting the tasks and the salaries (In Germany) of both and created this list:

Data Sience (62.544€ p.a)

• Ask questions
• Acquire data
• process and clean data
• Integreate and store data
• Apply machine learning, statistical modeling and artificial intelligence
• Measure and improve results
• Present results

Cyber Security (62.600€ p.a)

• Preventive protection against attacks
• Analysis of Cyber threats
• Monitoring of the IT sytems
• Managing security incidents and securing evidence
• Implementation of protective measures

So at the end you have to protect data an prevent attacks in the Cyber Security field and as an Data Science you have to analyze data and make a pretty result out of raw data. So it’s only a question of skills, knowledge and interests. If you are interested in analyzing data, you have to choose Data Science and if you are interested in protecting data, the Cyber Security field is your right choice.

But I like both fields and I love to analyze data but I also love to protect data, find new bug vulnerabilities and keep everything safe. My first thought was that Cyber Security sounds better and more professional but at the other side people don’t know what a Data Science do and would ask. Maybe you could show them how interesting this field is.

At the end my decision was Data Science and I don’t know if it’s the right field but I chose it because I think it’s a broad field. You could analyze broadband network data, survey results, traffic data, internet activity data or only a simple YouTube video. There are so many fields and you could work in so many different companies or departments. If you don’t like the traffic field, you could change your department and analyse medical data or what ever. As in the Cyber Security field you only protect data and don’t work with it and this is still the same work in different departments. Of course you have to learn new hacking methods and it’s not always the same. Especially hackers are creative in finding new ways to get data but I personally like to work with data.