I am deeply invested in sustainable development and environmentalism and hope to work in the field in the future. I think it is so incredibly important to think about how our actions can impact the environment and the world around us, especially due to the privilege that I have from living in the global north. This means that I will most likely work for a charity or NGO in the future. I believe that a master’s degree in the topic would be very beneficial to truly understand where I can cause the most change. I am a believer in continuous learning and hope to continue growing as a person as much as I did in my time at DCU.

Back in first year, while studying at home during covid, I did a class on business analytics. It covered basic functions in excel and I found it quite interesting. At the same time, my older sister was working her first job after graduating. One day, she called me downstairs and asked if I knew how to do a V-lookup in excel. I was so proud that I knew how to do something my sister didn't but it also blew my mind that she was had finished her degree and had been working at this job for a few months and couldn't do this simple function, she had always seemed to have good computer literacy. I did the function for her and went back to class (only to be called back down 5 minutes later because she had messed up my code). I still make fun of her about that.

A few weeks later, her company was looking for summer staff to finish out this large government project and my sister put my name forward. It was an amazing job for me who had only ever done low paying bartending jobs. I quickly became the "go to" person for excel issues despite being the youngest on my team by a lot. I was asked to help audit the project we were working on and was invited to management meetings because I could clean and explain large amounts of data.

At one point during my time there, I was talking to someone in their graduate program who had spent the last week going through all this data and individually searching for uncompleted lines. He told me he know that there must be a quicker way to do it but he didn't know how. I was spending maybe 10 minutes doing what took him full days to do.

I was so surprised that all these people who seemed competent on a computer couldn't do what I viewed as simple functions. I decided at the end of that job that I wanted to know more about what I could accomplish through coding. I know that any job I get, I will meet more people who can't do these things and I never want to spend hours going through data when a computer can do it in minutes.

Looking back on this job with my current knowledge, I've realised that my admin job had transformed organically into a business analytics position. I was taking raw data, cleaning it, understanding and transforming it. I would then explain the findings to non-technical managers in a way that was easy to understand and base decisions on. It was very rudimentary compared to what I can do now, but it highlights how important business analytics is to a company, even if they don’t realise it yet.

Resume

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