Thanks - yes I could, however I was hoping to skip that and go straight to a junior role. I see grads hired for such things all the same, I guess its impossible once you're not young any more.
I think there's more to it than that. So many people want to break into data science that the market is flooded at the junior levels. With the masters in stats you cover that half of the role, and the Java covers the programming side of it. I'll bet you could make a lateral move into an ml engineer role