An Interview With… Nina, a PhD Researcher

The newest part of our blog series ‘An Interview with …’ asks Nina, a PhD Researcher at the University of Bristol about how she (as a maths grad and formal social worker) decided to do a PhD and how she learns about data,

Working with data and technology can be difficult and overwhelming for a lot of people. So, we at Taught By Humans are running a series of interviews with professionals to help demystify these topics for you. How are data and technology useful and/or significant within different roles? How do people learn about data and technology, and their applications? How can we keep our knowledge of data and technology up to date? Our interviewees will be helping us to answer these questions and more.

Our newest interviewee is Nina, a PhD Researcher at the University of Bristol. She answered a few questions for us relating specifically to her experience moving from social work to a PhD, how she stays up to date with technology, and how she learns.

The Interview

Can you tell me your name and what you do?

My name is Nina de Caro, and I am a PhD student at the University of Bristol, women in my final year of my PhD

Tell us a bit more about your PhD.

It’s about using data from social media to find out if we can understand people’s mental health digitally. I’m researching whether your Twitter feed, for example, would be enough information to tell whether your mental health is declining, or if it’s improving over time. And we’re doing it with a cohort study that’s based in Bristol called the Avon achievement study of parents and children.

How did you end up doing this PhD project?

In a very roundabout way. I left school, I went to do a degree which was what most of the people in my year were doing. I didn’t really know what to do. So I thought I’d do maths because it seemed like something that was quite generic. And I could figure out later what I wanted to do with it. And when I was doing my maths degree, I realised that actually, I’d really like to be a social worker. All through my teenage years, I had done a lot of volunteering and working with people with disabilities or with mental health difficulties. and that was what I was really interested in. So I did a retraining program called Frontline which if you have a first degree, you can retrain to become a child protection social worker. So I did that for two years. It included a master’s, part time, in social work, as well as a placement in a local authority, holding cases and doing child protection. I loved it, it was amazing. I love working with children every day, I love working with families. But I also, I kind of felt like, it was a bit of a waste to have done my maths degree and then not do anything at all with it. So I wanted to figure out something that I could do. where I could use my maths background in a social work kind of context, to try and improve some aspects of social care, because I feel like social care is an area which could really, really benefit from some good data science kind of work. And then I saw this PhD project advertised, I applied for it, and I was lucky enough to get it. And here I am.

I really relate to what you’ve just said as I was always really interested in education, and now feel like my PhD is the same — my math degree, with my interest in education nicely combined to do some good, which is great. Did you do anything related to data when you were working in social work? How did you learn the needed data skills during your PhD?

No, no data in social work. I had some skills from doing my initial degree. But it had been quite a long time ago at that point, or at least it felt like a really long time ago, because it had been maybe by the time I started nearly three years since I’d last done any proper data work. I spent a lot of time at the beginning kind of enjoying slash not knowing what I was doing. I think it’s quite nice sometimes to really obviously not know what you’re doing because you feel like there are no expectations for you to get anything, right. I went to loads of events and conferences, I went to talks and like computer science departments, because obviously every department in the university has their own seminar series, and anyone could come along.I went to loads of stuff where I just had no idea what was going on. I was just like, it’s fine. It doesn’t matter that I don’t understand what’s happening because I’m not expected to know anything. That was quite nice because it was this weird way of picking up what was going on slowly. It took probably took me about a year to really feel like I understood what was happening. But then in terms of actual practical data skills, I did I definitely did some online courses in Python. I’ve never used Python before. And I wanted to learn it. I’d used R a little bit but not very much and not for a very long time. So I had to like relearn how to use R as well. And those were both online courses. I did the Python course because it was quite good. And it was just like starting literally from “how do you add two variables together?” To how do you process data files all the way up to being able to do like more complicated stuff. And that took probably about six months, I’d say to get like, relatively comfortable.

You lived in that unsureness for quite a while. And you really embraced it! Not everybody likes that feeling of not being good at something. So it’s good to hear that sometimes it’s good to embrace it. At Taught by Humans, we love spreadsheets. Do you use spreadsheets often in your work, or do you avoid them? How do you feel about them?

I love spreadsheets. On a completely unrelated side point. I’m getting married this year. And I really like AirTable at the moment, because AirTable lets you do relational databases, but in a spreadsheet format. So you can have links to other tables, as cells in a spreadsheet, which is really handy for a lot of like organising type things. I’ve made spreadsheets for everything. And one of my bridesmaids is like, I hate spreadsheets. Do we have to do this? Yes — because it makes me feel so much calmer. I’ve got pictures in there. It’s amazing. As a data scientist, people can be quite funny about spreadsheets and Excel in particular, because I think there’s an element of feeling like if you can code if you can use R and Python, that’s better than being able to use a spreadsheet. But I am a firm believer in that spreadsheets can be very useful if you’re using them for the right things.

Sometimes you just want to see the data, right? In Python, you can’t see everything. That’s always my logic, I like to look at the data — open into spreadsheets to take a look at it. I’m glad to know you love spreadsheets. We have a big campaign at the minute called Spreadsheet Shouldn’t be Scary. We’re trying to teach people like your bridesmaid who hate spreadsheets, they really shouldn’t be scary, we can help you.

You work in a really cool techie kind of area. And obviously, technology is always evolving and changing. For example, Python, and R, there’s always new stuff coming out in them. How do you stay up to date and on top of all the new stuff?

Oh, that’s a really good question. Twitter is very useful, I probably rely on it, maybe a bit too much sometimes to keep up to date with like, new releases of things. I follow a lot of the people who develop software that I use on Twitter. And generally if there’s a new release that comes out, they will share it and they will post about it. That’s really handy, actually. Because often, on Twitter, people do like nice bite sized summaries of things that have changed, instead of you having to trawl through code to work out what doesn’t work anymore, or what does. So that’s really handy. And it’s probably the main way to stay up to date with things. I am not perfect at this, I fully admit that there are times when I tried to use something, and it doesn’t work anymore. And I can’t work out why. Then I figure out it’s because the package has been updated or something has changed. And I did not realise that then I have to change everything.

That actually happened to me yesterday. Something called Font Awesome to do icons on my website. I was annoyed, and refreshing the page thinking “Why won’t this load?” And then they realised it’s because I using a very outdated version. I’m surprised it worked up until that point. Everyone should know this happens all the time!

Do you have a preferred learning style? Is there a way that you like to learn something?

I really like visual stuff. Personally I have to see things in pictures. I draw a lot of pictures when I’m making notes about things people are talking about. I find even quite simple explanations sometimes don’t make sense to me until I’ve seen them drawn out as like a process or as a diagram.

Now that’s really cool. Are you able to sketch notes as you’re listening to stuff?

I try. When I was doing lectures, especially when I was doing social training, I drew a lot of stuff. And now looking back at my notes like I do, sometimes I go back over things just to remind myself of something or other, I remember this picture. I remember exactly what that person is saying.

That’s such a cool way to learn. I’m not fast enough at drawing to ever be able to sketch things. What advice would you give to someone who was at the beginning of their like data confidence journey — just trying to start to learn things about data?

I would say probably two things. The first thing is, find something that’s very useful to you, and get good at it, and get confident with it. Because I think when you can do one thing really well, and that’s data related, it gives you a lot of confidence to branch out from that point. Once you have that one skill down, you can add to it and practice. But it’s not scary when you know that your grounding in that first thing is really, really good. I would definitely say that’s helpful. And then the other thing — it sounds obvious but it’s not always that easy in practice — just to be okay with not knowing how to do things. I think, like what you said about how things update all the time. I constantly feel behind in terms of what I know. I’ll read a new paper to stay up to date with what’s happening in research in my area. And I’ll be like, I’ll wonder how did they do that? You’ve just kind of got to embrace you just don’t know stuff. That’s hard. Sometimes it makes you feel absolutely rubbish that you don’t know what’s happening. But don’t give up!

Takeaways

So, what can we learn from this interview?

Takeaway #1: Embrace not knowing and being bad at things. This is how you learn and improve.

Takeaway #2: Tech is always changing and advancing, you can’t always be up to date. Everyone gets this wrong.

Takeaway #3: Find a way to learn which works for you. Perhaps this is sketching while you listen, or maybe something else.

Thanks to Nina for taking the time to speak to Taught By Humans and for sharing such valuable advice and insight. If this interview with Nina has been useful or of interest to you, she will be speaking on our International Women Day Panel — Our Data Confident Journey — sign up now.