What made you decide to change careers?
Data Science is a cross-industry field that is adjacent to my background in Math and Science. I was coming from research/management and wanted to get a hand into the large systems that use data to manage our daily life. Data science offered me an excellent view of both the machinery and its impact on people.
What was your dream job when you were a child?
Scientist. Working on understanding the world, piece by piece, and bringing it back to the rest of society in an easily digestible way seemed like the most appealing of all jobs.
You work as a Data Scientist at GovTech. What does your day-to-day role look like?
My role as data scientist is in close proximity with policy experts, project managers and data engineers. This means that my efforts go towards providing data thought leadership to the policy experts, providing prioritization to the project managers and having technical back and forths with the data engineers to get/clean/deploy data and code at different levels of maturity. In practice, this is a mix of emails, managing resources within a cloud provider, writing code (or tests for other people's code) and talking in meetings internally or with vendors.
What are the top advantages of your current role?
Being able to ask questions to very smart colleagues.
Taking a tool and having the resources to become proficient with it.
Being on the front seat of bringing solution ideas to life and delivering them to the ones who need them.
We like to say that there’s life “before” and life “after” Le Wagon, do you agree? Describe your before and after.
I agree. The bootcamp gave me confidence to approach a large variety of problems and demystified the first steps toward working with very complex systems (e.g. deploying a containerized solution on a cloud provider). I can say now that there is A LOT more to learn, but it is not impossible to build things in the real world.
What pushed you to take part in our Data Science bootcamp?
I wanted a profoundly hands-on experience that would walk me through the deeper ends of building and deploying solutions. The Le Wagon boot camp offered a no-nonsense approach to it.
#Funfact What was the defining moment during your training?
Seeing the application that my Le Wagaon project team had built, running on my wife's phone. Knowing that if I could achieve that, I could achieve so much more and this was just the beginning.
What's your New Year's resolution?
Much of 2022 was spent on continuing to upskill and making the role change. For 2023, my goal is to widen my scope of interests: from managing cloud platforms, to learning new languages, to tabletop role playing games.
