The question is very broad and may be considered a bad subjective question. The way that the question is phrased suggests this very clearly.
What do you consider a person must....?
This makes it more like an opinion poll. (it is not only subjective, but also unclear and broad, for instance what scope does the question ask about, which people do we consider, academics, engineers, IT specialists, average people, politicians?)
Similar (closed) questions on
There are also questions that did not get closed like design-patterns-that-every-developer-must-know but in principle stackexchange avoids to have these questions.
If the question is, for some reason, not being closed then at least it should be considered to be improved along the lines of the list here
Some subjective questions are allowed, but “subjective” does not mean “anything goes”. All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. What does that mean? Constructive subjective questions:
- inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”
- tend to have long, not short, answers
- have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone
- invite sharing experiences over opinions
- insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references
- are more than just mindless social fun
A good comparison (and contrast) is Gerard het Hooft's How to become a
GOOD Theoretical Physicist . If the question could be phrased in such a way that it leads to a fine answer like Gerard het Hooft's then the question may be usefull and constructive.
However theoretical physics is a reasonably confined field. Untill a student is starting to do a Phd a lot of the curriculum is pretty much the same or at least there are many resemblences among different programs (you can not say the same for statistics).
- Gerard het Hooft describes this as "Theoretical Physics is like a sky scraper" and his webpage is describing all the floors.
- Statistics is much more like a village with lots of different
buidlings. Even the building materials may be different
(wood/concrete/metal). A statistician like Edward Tufte specializes in
data visualisation, a machine learning Guru like Andrew Ng knowns all
about computer science, and a statistician like Ronald Fisher knows a
lot about mathematics (and biology). It will be very difficult to shape the question in such a form that it allows clear (conclusive) answers that will resemble something like Gerard's webpage.
The question 'How to become a good Theoretical Physicist' would be similarly difficult. It would also be leading to too much divergent possibilities to answer. (I have to think now about one of my instructors for a workgroup seminar in a first year astronomy class at University, answering to a more complicated question something like "Oh, I do not know anything about general relativity, I don't need to")
[references]
on the main site. You can also look at popular tags for suggested topics. $\endgroup$