Tech through the eyes of a Non-Tech Student
Introduction
Hello! I am Sijie, a second-year student majoring in Economics and Marketing Analytics at Singapore Management University. This summer, I am thankful to have the opportunity to intern at GovTech as a Digital Business Analyst under the Continuous Improvement team at Moments of Life (MOL).
During my internship, I was tasked to automate the generation of several key metrics, continuously update the dashboards with relevant graphs and highlight trends from the monthly data.
Why GovTech?
I chose GovTech as I wanted to gain experience working in the technology industry and I believe GovTech would be a good starting place to learn from and network with experts in the industry. Furthermore, the Digital Business Analyst role I applied for would not only allow me to hone my hard skills in data cleaning and visualisation, but also build invaluable soft skills required to thrive in the tech industry. As an Economics major, I wanted to gain real-world experience outside of my school curriculum and explore the different career possibilities. GovTech was the right place to be at, for me to explore my career interests!
Experience as a Digital Business Analyst
Out of GovTech’s values — Agile, Bold, and Collaborative, I believe ‘Agile’ would best describe the work I do. As there is a need to be flexible in my thinking when approaching tasks and make changes in stride when new suggestions or issues arise.
I had two main roles — (1) managing the GoBusiness (GB) Product Performance dashboards for Quantitative and Qualitative Data and (2) cleaning and processing GB’s raw data using Python for the said dashboards.
From the management of dashboards, I’ve learnt to keep an open mind to new ideas and to pivot when necessary. From the error correction to creating new layouts for a more cohesive data story , I had to adapt and respond efficiently to ensure the smooth running of the dashboards that are viewed by our GoBusiness stakeholders. It was important to continuously improve our dashboards for our users to gain a deeper insight and understanding of public sentiments towards GoBusiness .
To ensure that raw data is processed right, there is a constant need to look out for and make changes. Recently, our team has collected a data set that has helped us improve on the quality of questions asked. That has in turned give us better insights on how to improve the platform.
From this finding, I updated the code to capture their new sentiments and updated our list of ‘stop-words’ when processing the qualitative sentiments, to better clean the text data. For the quantitative data, I altered the code to extract only the data from new text categories (such as eAdvisers, Post-Login Data). Thereafter, I updated the dictionary that contained the different product classifications, with the new URL format of classification. Working in tech also meant that constant changes are expected to better the product or services as we go along. This has taught me the importance of being “Agile” and adapting our code based on the latest findings to ensure smooth data processing.
Lastly, I took the initiative to look for ways to automate the calculation of our satisfaction ratings and e-Adviser volume, which were earlier done manually. I had to treat different sheets with different levels of care, as some required specific breakdowns of their sub-products such as eAdvisers (GovAssist, Events, Premise Use Check, Licensing eAdvisers). After several trials and attempts, I successfully finished the automation for these statistics which helped to save my team a lot of time when churning the monthly statistics. From this experience, I grew to be more resilient and flexible in my thinking as I often had to think outside the box to fix errors and continuously improve my code.
Supportive Team and Team Leader!
I enjoyed and loved the culture of my team because it is open and supportive. I felt that my inputs and insights are heard and taken into consideration by my superiors and team member, which made me feel like a valued member of the team.
The team is always willing to answer my questions and guide me during my tasks and assignments. For example, when we had some questions about the GoBusiness HelpDesk services, I was able to reach out to the person-in-charge Peter Tan directly. He was very patient in answering my questions. Our team leader, Simon Ang, routinely reaches out to everyone, including interns, for a 30-minute informal coffee chat on a quarterly basis. I had a wonderful time speaking to him about his experience with the Continuous Improvement Team that he helmed. He was very friendly and open to listening to me speak about my current work at GovTech.
Overall, I am very thankful to have been part of a team with such nurturing colleagues and friendly culture!
My Greatest Takeaway!
Through this internship, I was able to find a direction for my future career. Given the networking opportunities, I interacted and spoke with many GovTechies to understand more about their careers and work experiences. As I come from a non-tech background, I realised that it would be relatively more difficult for me to enter a technical role in the future, given the fierce competition even among students with a tech-degree. I now know that my next steps are to gain more real-life experiences through more internships to better understand what kind of role I would be best suited for.
Enriching Experience, 10/10 Recommend!
As this was my first internship, I am incredibly grateful to my team members for making this internship an amazing and invaluable one. I was given the chance to give inputs and have a sense of ownership over the materials I created, which has motivated me to do better.
I am very thankful for all the guidance and support along the way, and it was really enjoyable to work together with everyone. Thank you to my reporting officer and team members for creating an encouraging and safe environment where I was pushed to learn and grow!
GovTech is hiring Interns!
If you would like to intern at GovTech, applications are now opened! Visit go.gov.sg/govtechinternship to find out more about their programme.
