I just got interviewed rather extensively at http://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2015/02/interview-expert-ajay-ohri-founder-decisionstats-com/
Interview with Industry expert – Ajay Ohri
Kunal: You started data science career much before people would have heard about it and it became one of the hottest field around. What were the challenges that you faced during the initial stages of your professional career?
Ajay: Cool question man. Yeah it used to be called business analytics, then data analytics and now its data science. What will they call it next?
Initial challenges: R was raw (this was 2007) , SAS was expensive, even Open Office was not so good as it is now. Getting a pipeline of work, leads for clients, converting leads to contracts and chasing people to pay me after work done were initial challenges.
you can read the rest of the interview at http://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2015/02/interview-expert-ajay-ohri-founder-decisionstats-com/
DECISION STATS 
Hello Ajay,
I thought your entreprenurial spirit was very inspiring. So, I am writing to you for some advise. I have been working in the BI space for many years and have been working toward a MS degree in Predictive Analytics. It is my effort to get more into the advanced analytics space. While school work has prepared me well in the concepts of Pred Analytics, Data mining, Web Analytics, SAS programming and Python programming, I feel that I am lacking a sense of direction as to what I want to focus on. In your interview, you mentioned that you often turned down boring work. What kind of work interested you in the early stages?
work that added to my skills in terms of breadth. like regression modeling instead of dashboards and reports on financial performance. you will learn anyways. what you choose to learn is the critical choice