Laura’s Experience
About halfway through my Ph.D. studies in Physics at the University of Notre Dame, I realized that an academic career path was not as attractive to me as it had been when I entered graduate school. After exploring career options for Ph.D. graduates, I thought that data science might be a good fit for me since my favorite part of research in graduate school was when I would use programming skills to discover something new in our experimental data. After taking some online classes to learn more about data science I decided I wanted to get a more hands-on experience in the field before I graduated.
I decided to apply for the Science to Data Science (S2DS) Virtual program and was selected to be in the October 2018 cohort. Despite the very early work hours (I was participating from the U.S.) it was a wonderful experience. During the program, I worked as part of a four person team on a project for GoCompare, a financial comparison website. Our goal during the five week program, was to develop a machine learning model in Microsoft Azure that could categorize bank transactions by the nature of the expense. Through this project, we learned how to clean data, develop features, label training and test data, evaluate the performance of various machine learning models on the data, and how to deploy the finalized model as an API within Azure. We got to experience the full pipeline of a data science project and in the end provided GoCompare with a working API!
Working on a project from beginning to end was great, but my favorite part of the program by far was collaborating with my awesome teammates each day. We had daily full team meetings with advisors from the S2DS program sitting in to answer questions, and we also spent a lot of time pair-programming which helped me learn a lot about Python and data science. Although I had taken several relevant classes online before S2DS, I learned the most about data science from my teammates while working on a project with real world data.
In addition to all the wonderful knowledge I gained from the program, my experience working on a project from beginning to end impressed potential employers enough to get several interviews after graduation and gave me confidence to approach each interview knowing I was prepared. Currently, I am a Data Scientist at SUZOHAPP, working as part of a team that develops software for cash recycling machines. Since I am the only Data Scientist on the team, I have been responsible for every part of my current project including data processing, feature generation, model exploration and productizing the final models. Although our project at GoCompare was a bit more abbreviated than my current project, that experience has helped me immensely to succeed in my current position. I wholeheartedly recommend S2DS to anyone interested in a career in data science.
