A pre-requisite to be a Data Scientist

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So what should be in the toolkit of people who call themselves a data scientist?

A fundamental skill is the ability to manipulate data. A data scientist should be familiar and comfortable with a number of platforms and scripting tools to get the job done. What is difficult in Excel might be trivial in R. And when R struggles, you should switch to Unix (or use a programming language such as Python) get that portion of the data munging done. Along the way, you pick up a lot of tips and tricks. For example: how to read a big datafile in R?

The goal is to get the job done. Familiarity with a wide variety of tools, and expertise in some is the hallmark of any good would-be data scientist.

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