from Environmental Policy to Data Analytics (Part 1)
This is not a story about achievements, but about growth.
Year 0 — From tree hugger to… Data-what?
2016
I was miserable. Having studied Environmental Policy in the UK, I had dreams of implementing policies to make our world a more environmentally sustainable place. Upon coming back to Singapore, however, reality came crashing down painfully when there was a lack of job opportunities in this sector. I was disillusioned to say the least. I took on an internship to bide time.
That was when a friend, Ben, saw me in my misery one Tuesday evening as I burst into tears feeling stuck and upset with the meaningless work I was doing. He asked if I would like to chat more, and so we did.
Ben asked me what I generally liked to do — I struggled to answer that question because I only had 1 internship prior, where I was going to recycling bins weekly sorting out recyclables from non-recyclables. So it was a hard place to start, but I just recounted my university days and told him my favourite subject was Econometrics since I liked how it was a quantifiable way of understanding the causality of things. He chimed — “I think you’ll like Data Analytics then”. Confused, I said “Data-what?”
What followed was Ben taking out his clunky Macbook Pro the following Sunday at a coffee shop, and explained how very-alien-looking-writings (i.e. R programming script) could be used to read an image of handwritten words and translate it into digital words (i.e. Natural Language Processing). He walked me through the code line-by-line, and I was amazed and excited and asked many questions. Little did I know, this was interview round one. That conversation ended with Ben saying, “Why not have a coffee chat with my colleague to find out more about Funding Societies?” which was the FinTech start-up he worked for. Coffee chat sounded great to me. So I met this “colleague” for what I was expecting to be, well — a coffee chat.
There was no coffee. It was a full blown, 3-hour interview with a whiteboard and a marker pen. At the end of it — Mao (who I later learnt was the CTO), said “Happy to have you onboard, we’ll send you a contract”. That was when I realised I just got interviewed. It was not a coffee chat.
I thought to myself, what’s the worst that could happen? I either end up getting fired in 3 months for not knowing anything about Data, or I quit. I signed the contract and began a totally unexpected journey.
Year 1 — “What is VLOOKUP?”
2017
Day 1 — I joined Funding Societies with the title of a “Data Analyst”, and was warmly welcomed by the bubbly personality of the Head of Customer Experience at that time, Shyanne. “Hey Gwen, I heard you’re the new data analyst! I’m having some difficulty with my VLOOKUP formula on excel, can you help?”
I blurted, “What’s VLOOKUP?”
Embarrassed, I went home that night and googled to find out about VLOOKUP, and realised it was a basic Excel formula any analyst would have heard of. I tried to make amends and fixed Shyanne’s VLOOKUP formula, but what ensued in me was months of insecurity, and imposter syndrome.
The following weeks and months, people I met would ask me what I do for work. My response — “I’m a Data Analyst in title, but in truth more like a Data-Analyst-Wannabe”. I said this repeatedly to many people I met, until one fine day, a good friend of mine, Jecolia, stopped me.
“Stop saying that!” she exclaimed. “You’re a Data Analyst, and that’s what you are! Stop it.”
While her reaction shocked me, and gave me a bit more confidence to accept my role, I still had a lot of self-doubt. I asked Ben — why did he hire me when I didn’t even know how to use Excel, knew nothing about Finance, or Data for that matter. I made it clear to him that I didn’t just want to be paid to do work I can’t do just because I’m his friend.
“I hired you to be the bridge between the tech and business teams and to build community at the workplace”. Confused, I just left it at that. Sure, ok.
The rest of the year was spent learning Excel, dashboarding, my first programming language, R, and the Command-line (that cool green bunch of lines on a computer screen that looks like the matrix). With Ben’s enforcement, I adopted the motto of “Google is my best friend” and happily spent my usual December holiday in Hong Kong that year in the hotel lounge trying to memorise and familiarise myself with all these technical concepts.
Year 2 — Series B Grey Hair
2018
This was really stressful. I was still the only Data Analyst back then (and still couldn’t use a basic programming language, SQL), with Ben as my manager. We were in the midst of our company’s Series B fundraising, which required me to send data in a complete, accurate, and very, very timely fashion to potential investors who would provide us lots of money for our company to survive.
I thought to myself, if I screwed up, we could all be out of jobs. The pressure was on. I was inexperienced, and still fumbling around with data. I worked directly with Kelvin, our founder, who would contact me for urgent data requests.
Surprise surprise, I made mistakes. They were not few. I didn’t triangulate the data to ensure it was consistent across all reports, didn’t know how to check my work properly, and would send them out to my poor founder who just wanted accurate data so he can get on with his life. Kelvin was very patient and understanding, and he never took it out on me despite my incompetencies. He’d correct me and point out to me the mistakes in a gentle fashion. He was humble and never made me feel bad.
It was also during this incident when Ben told me, if I made a mistake, it was his responsibility, not mine. This concept was new to me and shocked me.
I felt immensely supported, and that it was an environment which allowed me to make mistakes and grow. Despite their support, it did not take away the fact that I literally grew a bunch of white hair, which stays with me till this day. I call it the “Series B grey hair”.
Thankfully we closed Series B well, there were no complaints (I think) from the external investors and we celebrated with an epic yacht party.
The rest of the year was spent growing my technical skills — getting excited about automating people’s lives away through Python packages (Pandas, Beautiful Soup, Selenium, etc).
In December that year, I was in Hong Kong again, at the same lounge chair in my hotel, learning Python…
Continue to Part 2 of my growth journey where I share more about becoming a first time manager.
Special thanks to Glennice Yong for the edits.
