allWomen Talk: The Journey from Academia to Data
Carmen Herrero shares her personal experience on transitioning from academia to business, and how this led her to her current role: Senior Data Scientist at Typeform.
Looking back at her journey, the first thing that comes to mind is: it isn’t an easy road. Each one of us has different backgrounds, experiences, capabilities, skills... It can’t be the same for everyone, so we must keep this in mind. It’s not easy to get there, but in Carmen’s words: “you can definitely do it — if you want to”.
She started out from a super specific field (Ph.D in Relaxation Models Applied to Paleoclimate Dynamics — in other words, how the different physical mechanisms of the ocean affect the climate), and is currently working towards making conversations more meaningful and helping connect people using a screen at Typeform.
One might wonder how a physicist would be interested in such a role in a private company. According to Carmen, studying physics was a means of getting very big answers to very big questions, such as how things work (for instance, the earth, the universe, the ocean). She realized that she loved having questions and searching for answers in a different way, using data to create models to get those answers.
But academia has its own challenges. Carmen’s motivation is to continuously grow personally and professionally, and to make an impact. So one thing that was very frustrating to her was: “No one really cared about what I was doing, there seemed to be no impact on anything or anyone. And I wanted to do something meaningful, be able to actually help people, do something real”. And also stability. Though academia was really great, reaching financial stability became a very big goal.
So it’s safe to say that her 6-year journey led to a role where she has the opportunity to have an impact on people’s lives. After working for a consultancy firm, developing pricing models at Mango, exploring different parts of data science and warehousing at Kodify, she is currently working on creating meaningful conversations at Typeform. This involves helping people talk better, improving the company’s product, creating models to make the best possible solutions and products to make the life of the employees better.
A few lessons she shared with us:
- Believe in yourself. You can do whatever you want to do. The skills can be learned, you simply need to find what motivates you and what you’’re really good at.
- Impostor syndrome is real, and it’s ok, we just need to be aware of it. There’s absolutely no one who knows everything or is perfect, it’s just impossible. Everyone has something that they’re good at, so make the most of it. Being a data scientist nowadays, seems to be a lot about what tools you know, but it’s really about asking the right questions. You need to know the tools, but it’s not the most important.
- Focus on one programming language. There are many programming languages nowadays. Focus on one, and master that. You need to be able to tell the program what you need. It’s important to understand the whole pipeline, not mastering every stage, but having the complete picture. The aim of data science is answering business questions, putting in production something that will really work and be useful.
- Focus on communication and storytelling skills. If you’re not able to communicate right, it doesn’t really exist. We need to be masters on explaining why , how and what we are doing. Albert Einstein’s quote sums it up pretty well: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”. Machine learning, data science, it’s all about making things understandable. Make it simple, make it work.
When asked about how she feels about our future as women in data science, Carmen replied: “I’m a believer. I think there’s still a lot of effort to be made, we need to create equal position for men and women, even if we’re on a sector when men are more dominant historically. And it’s important to stop measuring productivity in terms of working hours”.
In her journey from academia to data science, what Carmen considers to be the most relatable part of her experience is: “I feel like a lot of people don’t believe they have the ability to enter the private sector. Somehow, they think they are not enough, and this happens a lot with women. And we all have flaws, but we can also be good at our job. It’s a matter of believing in yourself”.
