DM: Looking for advice in becoming a DM

[Scott Nicholson]

Greetings!

First, a little background...

I'm currently working at the University of North Texas on my PhD in
Information Science, and I stumbled across data mining.  It has swept 
me
away and I have become very interested in it.  I'm in a DM course 
right
now, and have been taking all of the business statistics I can fit 
into my
degree.

My bachelors is in mathematics & computer programming, and my masters 
in
library & information science.  I worked for 3 years at the 
University of
Oklahoma as a network/database administrator (using Paradox for DOS 
at the
time and the PAL programming language).  I've been working with 
Information
Retrieval for some time, and thus, DM is a very interesting area that
combines my backgrounds.

I want to do DM in the real world.  I'm in the Dallas area, and would 
like
to find a way to do some data mining part-time or in a co-op basis as 
I
finish my PhD (looking to complete it in spring 2000).  After that 
time, I
would like to work for a large company as a data miner.  I have very 
little
business coursework outside of stats and DM.  

Now, to the question...

What should I do?  What other coursework would be useful to me?  How 
should
I go about finding a company to work with on a part-time or co-op 
basis?
I'm very excited about the idea, and want to try it before committing 
my
life to it.

One thing I'm noticing in the job ads is experience with SQL, so that 
is on
my short list of things to pick up.

Thanks for any advice you can give...

Scott Nicholson






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