Suliman’s Experience

Suliman Belal

S2DS Alumni Autumn 2023

After completing my PhD and over 15 years of working as a researcher in the fields of Biomedical engineering and Neuroscience at various UK universities, I decided to explore new career opportunities outside academia. Because I already have the foundational skills of a data scientist, which I gained during various posts, I needed to bridge the gap between academia and industry – and S2DS did exactly that!

S2DS is a five-week bootcamp tailored for people with an advanced degree in analytical science. I feel the word “bootcamp” doesn’t do S2DS justice because unlike most data science programmes, where the focus is on theoretical learning, S2DS focuses on training you to use your analytical knowledge and apply it in a commercial setting. This is done by completing a data science project within an industry-like environment where you work collaboratively within a team to deliver a product by the end of the five weeks.

As a researcher I had been part of multidisciplinary teams, so teamwork was not strange to me. However, what S2DS offers is not only the team experience, but also how to develop a software product in a team framework from putting the product specifications to choosing the metrics for evaluating the final product — all through the Agile framework. In that sense, S2DS gave me a real experience of the development lifecycle of a new product in the industry.

For the S2DS project, I was part of a team of five talented scientists. A project summary was given to us by Pivigo which had been prepared by an industrial company. The project work commenced on day one through meetings with our client as well as with our mentor from Pivigo. Through putting our skills into practice and through collaboration, discussions and the use of Git and GitHub, our project progressed from data cleaning to feature engineering and into modelling. We met the client partners twice a week and presented our findings. There was also a midterm presentation where we presented our work to the clients and to other S2DS teams.

Although the pace of the project was fast, the experience was immense. A typical day would start with a short scrum meeting with the team members and the technical mentor. We took turns being the scrum master, so we were all exposed to different roles. In no time, the project steps became clear with well-defined tasks, and at the end of the five weeks we delivered to our client a working, validated prototype.

In addition to providing us with industrial experience, S2DS also offered us a number of seminars to assist us in the search for jobs in the data science job market, on how to prepare our CVs and on good coding practices. Furthermore, there are also private S2DS channels for fellows on LinkedIn and Slack, where S2DS alumni can communicate and recommend jobs.

I truly enjoyed the S2DS experience. For those who seek a transition from academia to data science, I wholeheartedly recommend this path.