Olivia Rennison is an Analytics Developer and is studying the MSc Data Science in the School of Built Environment, Engineering and Computing at Leeds Beckett University. 

• Course: MSc Data Science

Tell us a bit about yourself

I have been studying my masters in data science and working at the same time. My whole world revolves around data, which is just the way I like it. In my spare time I love listening to data podcasts and reading data related books. I like to get involved with Women in Tech events and have been volunteering in teaching women to code. I worked extremely hard to finish my masters with a data related job, and I now work as an Analytics Developer.

What attracted you to study and work in data science and what interests you the most about the subject area? 

I have always been interested in technology from a young age. I studied A-Level IT, and then went on to study a Business Technology degree. After graduating from my bachelors, I started on a graduate scheme with Atos in SAP Development. SAP, explained simply, is just one big database. Thrust into programming in SAP’s own programming language ABAP, my favourite part was always collating and joining the tables. I was on furlough for a while during lockdown and looking through some SAP training, I started to look at data modelling and star schemas. Thus, sparked my interest in Data Science. I did some Udemy courses on Business Intelligence, and then had the idea to apply for a masters.

Why did you choose Leeds Beckett?

I chose Leeds Beckett because of the course content, which included both analytics and AI. I really couldn’t have asked for better content. I've had the chance to learn everything I wanted, SQL, data warehousing, machine learning, statistics and data visualisation. My advice when looking at university courses is to look at the course content, everything I’ve learnt on this course is relevant to industry. 

What have been your course highlights so far and how has the course helped you in your role?

It has honestly been one of the best, but hardest years of my life. I really have enjoyed every minute of this masters and shown myself just what I can achieve in a year. One of my highlights is building my own data warehouse and doing all the ETL manually. Another highlight was learning about how machine learning algorithms work - I really thought you had to be a rocket scientist to know that, but I’ve proven you don’t! Also, a couple of the modules allow you to steer the topic in any direction, so I was able to add in some data ethics research which I am extremely passionate about.

Before I finished my course, I got a job as an Analytics Intelligence Developer, so everything I learnt on my masters applies to my job. 

What advice would you give someone thinking about studying data science? 

This industry is growing exponentially, and so are the jobs relating to it. This course is such a practical degree, and you can take this data science course down any direction / subject you want to. 

• If your favourite subject is chemistry, think about all the data and datasets created by experiments
• In anthropology, the relationship between humans and technology is constantly being researched and there is still so much for us to discover
• If you are interested in English, think about computational linguistics, especially needed for natural language processing
• In psychology, the reinforcement learning approach to machine learning was created by a behavioural psychologist
• The list could go on!

If you see something in a module you might struggle with (I thought this about statistics as I don’t have an A-Level in maths), but I worked hard and exceeded my expectations. I signed up to this course knowing it would be hard, and a challenge - but the knowledge I have gained has allowed me to start my career in data science. 

Data science is for everyone because everything involves data.