A Develop-Mental Journey #4

An Offer by S2DS — Science to Data Science

S2DS is a data-science training boot-camp, which includes training in the skill set of a data scientist and the opportunity to work on a real-world problem in a small team. I applied, had an interview and was successful in being offered a place on the virtual programme that is taking place in March.

I was made aware of S2DS in October of last year by the Royal Holloway Physics Dept. Employer Engagement Officer, Claire Barber, who put me in contact with Maya Dillon, the then outreach officer for S2DS. I was encouraged to get involved and signed up to be an ambassador — it was this involvement which kick-started my exploration of data-science and fuelled my engagement with social-media.

The offer of a place was very exciting and I was keenly anticipating taking part. However, after some careful consideration I decided that the completion of my thesis comments and my current commitment to the experiment of my PhD were responsibilities that had to take priority.

There is another, non-virtual, S2DS boot-camp being run in London this August and I may well re-apply to attend. I would also encourage any final year, or recently finished PhD students, interested in data-science as a career, to consider applying.

Meanwhile I have made contact with Harnham, a data science recruitment agency, and will be keeping an eye out for positions. I am also looking out for internships or placement schemes as another possible route into the data science arena. I am also taking the opportunity to learn some new skills as part of my thesis updates and temporary placement. So far this includes working on a Monte Carlo simulation of a detector using Geant4, a well used detector modelling package in the physics community, and working with the new detector data-acquisition database to extract from mysql to sqlite and use the output in analysis.

I continue to read articles and posts from the various sources, an article that I particularly enjoyed recently was “Five Ways to Get Fired as a Data Scientist” — some good advice to keep in mind!