Introducing Data Science at BGL Tech…
My journey to the team known as the ‘wizards’
I joined BGL Tech almost two years ago as a Statistician. I’ve always been good with figures and quantifying data but I soon realised the role wasn’t for me and I wanted more exposure to Data Science. Thankfully, there are so many opportunities and plenty of people willing to help you find the right role, so in February this year, I secured a place in the Data team as a Senior Insight Analyst.
On my first day, my manager presented me with this Data Scientist cushion, thus making my team initiation complete. I still proudly present this small token gift by my desk today!
As for the job itself…
Practically, we’re mainly a project-based team, and we’re often responsible for one or more projects at any given time. Each one of them starts with one or more problems that we’re trying to solve using data. We have a huge amount of it in the business, but we also look at external sources. We use mainly R and SQL, building dashboards in Shiny. We also use a lot of Machine Learning, from LASSO models to XGBoost, depending on the problem we’ve got to tackle. To be completely honest, there are tough days in a high-pressured environment but luckily, they’re quite rare (like us wizards and magicians!)
What I really enjoy doing is understanding what the problem is and working out a solution, bounded to some limits. At this point, as an Insight Analyst, you need to know what data you are looking for, where to pull it from and what it should look like. You have the chance to explore the data you retrieve, understand what’s going on and decide how to proceed. You can experiment with any new fancy methods you read about and even explore a completely different approach, which is encouraged.
This is clear by the support I receive when I get to go to industry meetups or to conferences — in the past two months alone, I’ve attended PyData Cambridge, Data Insight Cambridge, London Text Analytics, Data Science London and Data Science Festival. The mission is to go and learn as much as possible, so that we can continue to evolve and find new ways of doing things. We’re definitely not afraid of trying new things which is one of the reasons I love this role.
As for the team itself, I’ve joined a great team of people both on a professional and on a personal level. We usually manage to have a social event outside of work every month and although it sometimes may only be once, I believe these events help greatly in maintaining the excellent work environment you can find in this team.
