A Day in the Life
9:00 AM: My day typically begins with reading and replying to any overnight emails. If nothing urgent has rolled in, I settle into the day by quickly browsing my favorite industry news sites (TechCrunch, Quartz etc.) over a cup of Nespresso.
9:30 AM: I sit down with my project team to discuss progress made yesterday and to agree priorities for today. It’s a very collaborative office, so all members of the team are involved in bouncing ideas off each other. Often we’ll be faced with a problem no-one has come across before so all perspectives are welcome!
10:00 AM: I’m working on a data analytics project modelling churn (subscribers who discontinue service) propensity for a leading pay TV provider. After the team discussion, I know which variables to prioritize for today’s analysis and I set about interrogating the data, producing summary statistics and graphs so we can quickly ascertain if the variable will be useful as a predictor or not. Over the past few weeks I’ve become somewhat of an expert user of ‘R’ (a statistical programming language), despite having never used it prior to the project.
12:30 PM: I feel hungry so I suggest to my team that we head out for lunch. Typically, most of the office will eat together at our lunch table. We natter about people’s weekends activities and discuss (argue) about topical tech issues that have cropped up in the news.
1:15 PM: After lunch, I resume my analytics work and later pop down to see some colleagues from the Managed Analytics team that is collaborating with the Strategy team on this project. I ask them to modify some of our existing data variables and draw in some more from new sources based on what I discovered from my work earlier in the day.
4:00 PM: I take a break from project work to present a short ‘brown bag’ session to the UK and US analysts about a past project I worked on. It’s really useful to share insights and learnings from projects amongst colleagues so that our collective knowledge grows as quickly as possible.
5:00 PM: I synthesize my key findings for the day onto some slides and circulate these to the project team. As part of the email, I outline a rough plan for tomorrow and call out any problem areas which I’ve come across so my manager can prioritize tasks for tomorrow. We will discuss these issues in greater detail in the morning and agree on a plan of action.
6:00 PM: I finish the day with something a bit different by writing up a one-page company profile about our graduate career opportunities. It will feature in a brochure at a campus career fair that I have organized for Cartesian to attend in the Autumn. We are all encouraged to take on extra responsibilities in the office and I enjoy playing an active role in the recruitment of new analysts from my former university.
