My Journey to Data Science

The digital explosion of data has created an abundance of data, which spells out the objective functioning of all organizations. There are new problem for businesses to tackle, new insights to gather and extracting the ‘needles from the haystack’ has become increasingly important.

Health Data Analyst

It started off with an incredible internship working on the Health Neighbourhoods Project of Durham Region in 2014 led by two amazing mentors and Epidemiologists.

Durham Region has 50 Health Neighbourhoods. We present more than 80 indicators, by neighbourhood and municipality, to tell us about the demographics and health of our communities.

It was here that I learned the basics of programming through Excel VBA where I built a script to aggregate multiple Excel documents into a single spreadsheet saving weeks worth of work.

Solutions Consultant / Business Analyst

The amazing team at 360insights both widened, and deepened my proficiency in business analysis and data wrangling skills. I was able to work with companies such as Sony, Yokohama Tires, Motorolla and other brands to produce custom reports based on the campaign that was being delivered. It was also around this time (2017) that I started learning python. I would take reports that I could perform using Excel, and I would challenge myself to use python to generate them.

Business Intelligence Analyst

After spending 3 years at 360insights, I was very grateful for the lessons and connections but I was ready for a new challenge. I wanted to connect the advances of data and technology with applications in the Health Care industry, so the role at CMCC was the perfect next step. Building solutions using the Electronic Medical Records was both fun and challenging. The unstructured nature made data wrangling challenging, but there were certain fields which were useful and I was able to build value from.