How to start working in the field of statistics?

Question

Python

Hello community!
Briefly: I have two months, I want to start making a living doing statistics. I have basic programming skills, no real experience, I need absolutely any advice.
And now I apologize for the many beeches.
My name is Timofey, I'm 22, I've just completed my second year at the Astronomical Department of Mathematics and Mechanics at St. Petersburg State University. I had to take a break in education for two years. For the last six months, I have been mainly doing two sessions at the same time and filling in the gaps after this very pause. My parents are not able to support me (which, in a sense, is even good), so over the past few years I have changed many places and areas of work. I worked in the sales department, on phone calls, as a tea master, at a construction site, and even lectured a little. Last year I worked in turns in two different hostings in technical support. During the school year, changing jobs is beyond the bounds of the possible, because our workload is quite serious. However, thoughts that we need to move somewhere have been brewing for a long time. In addition, the employer rolled out completely unacceptable conditions, and along with the end of the session, I quit at the same time. And there is no desire to continue to grow and work in this area. For while the main and global goal is science.
The main task at the moment for myself, I see the following: in two months, learn to earn at least 10-15 thousand per month so that it:
1) can be realistically combined with a full-fledged study in the full-time department of mat-fur;
2) was helpful.
In addition to skills directly from past jobs, I can write a little in Fortran and C, I understand guitars and sound a little, I can type quite tolerably in LaTeX, and in general I can dig and teach astronomy really well to children. I'm used to Linux and reading mans in English.
So far, it seems like a good idea to freelance in the field of statistics. It seems that you can really earn money with this, besides, firstly, it is already much closer to science, and secondly, as I understand it, it is a necessary base and propaedeutics for machine learning, data mining and other neural networks , which is an interesting long-term goal for me both in general development in IT and in relation to astronomy.
First of all, I'm going to raise the knowledge that we were given on the theory classes and recall the practices on it on R.
I'm also going to prepare for admission to the ShAD course during the year, but this is already a bit aside.
There are two more months before the start of my studies, I am ready to work hard, I am ready to read books, articles, take online courses. Of course, the issue of earning money for the summer itself needs to be resolved, but, in principle, now it seems to me quite possible to find some kind of side job, because I did not find any internships on the topic.
Separately, it is important to note that starting from September-October, all 5/2 ninety-six variations become completely impossible, because you have to go to couples, and the university and hostel are in Peterhof (a suburb of St. Petersburg, this is where the fountains are). Therefore, the best thing is remote.
Actually, I will be glad to any advice, parting words and considerations. How to join the world of freelancing in the field of statistics, what methods and libraries in R, python or something else are most important to master, are there any open source projects that it makes sense to try to join in my situation? Maybe there are some specific books, articles, courses that, in your opinion, can be especially useful to me? Maybe statistics is not a very suitable area for my tasks and you have other ideas?
If you have any thoughts, advice, leading questions, suggestions, etc - I will be very happy and grateful if you share them.

Answer 1

If for python, then this is numpy, pandas and other projects like anaconda there.
In general, I had acquaintances with astronomers from mathmech - they all work over the hill now. and live ...
In general, if you need money to live on, then my advice is this: python with popular frameworks and some kind of your own project. So that people have something to show and figure it out for themselves. Further junior to a distance. now here and Russian companies are practicing this.
If science is grants, at the university you need to be friends with useful teachers. These can sometimes help. There money is not very regular, but found. There already under the project of a tulza to study. But python will be useful there too.
They want one here does not interfere with the other.
Z.Y. for little money with a low level of entry, you can become a tester. They are in demand. And it is more likely, if interested, to leave manual testing for automation later.

Answer 2

Stepika has courses in both R and statistics (with problems in R).
The teacher of one of the courses ("Fundamentals of Programming in R") Anton Antonov even created a group for applying R in the financial sector.