Fiona’s Experience
Fiona ReidS2DS Alumni 2019After nearly 20 years working at different universities in the fields of Geophysics and High Performance Computing, I decided it was time to do something a bit different. Data Science looked to be a field where I could use many of my existing skills and also learn something completely new.
To make the transition I started teaching myself a range of Data Science techniques along with learning Python. I completed a Coursera Machine Learning Course and also started teaching on the Software and Data Carpentry courses at University of Edinburgh so I could share my newly acquired knowledge with others. Teaching is a brilliant way to learn, as in order to teach and explain a subject you really need to understand it first.
During the summer of 2019 I participated in the S2DS London programme which allowed me to further expand my data science knowledge and also to gain the invaluable experience of working in a small team and helping a company to solve some of their data science problems. I worked with SMRS, an education, media and youth marketing business. Our project output was to provide a model that SMRS could use to better target advertising when attracting students to the high education sector.
During the S2DS programme our team used a number of different tools and technologies. We used Google Drive for file and document sharing between team members and a secure Microsoft Sharepoint for sharing data with SMRS. All of our code was maintained using GitHub ensuring code could be easily worked on by everyone. For coding we mainly used Python with some additional bash scripting to enable code and files to be more easily manipulated and packaged for distribution to SMRS at the end of the project. Our Python stack used standard packages such as Numpy and Pandas with Scikit Learn for modelling. In addition, we made use of the imblearn package and SMOTE (synthetic minority oversampling technique) in particular to balance our dataset prior to modelling.
After S2DS I took a short holiday and then started my new career as a Data Scientist. I was in the very fortunate position of having the new role prior to commencing the S2DS programme but have found the skills learned and experience gained during the S2DS programme extremely useful in my new role.
I'm currently working as a Data Scientist at Lloyds Banking Group. In my role I use Data Science, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques to solve problems relating to Risk in banking. The best thing about my role is the variety and opportunity to continually learn new skills. Every day I'm learning about new aspects of Data Science, Python libraries, databases, text and numerical processing techniques and also how the banking system works. No two days are ever the same which keeps my brain active. I'm part of a small team, everyone is fantastically helpful with our different skills and backgrounds complementing each other incredibly well. It's a really a great environment to work in.
