Emily joined Medialab in 2018 as a Graduate from Surrey University after studying Mathematics. As a Senior Data Scientist, Emily talks about her day working across several client projects as well as her role as a Mental Health Ally.
6am
Alarm goes off at 6am on the dot. A good snooze fest occurs while I try and get myself out of bed for a workout, coffee run or to get myself ready for the day.
8am
I’m usually at my desk and logged, running through my to do list with a coffee in hand, scanning the urgent needs for the day along with several meetings that I will have lined up.
9am
We start the day with our daily team catch up for half an hour. I work in the data team, which is made up of data analysts, data engineers and data scientists.
We’re a large team of about 12 people so we have a quick-fire update of what everyone is working on and then we like to mix it up for the second half of the meeting depending on the day of the week. For example, on Tuesday’s we all come armed with a fun fact of the day. This morning we all went into randomly allocated breakout rooms for the last 5 minutes of the meeting to have a one to one catch up with someone. It’s a different person every week to make sure we retain that team feeling. I love having a good chat with everyone when we are in the office, so whilst working remotely this is the next best thing!
9.30am
I head up part of the data science team, so after the wider data team meet, I have a quick internal check in with the other data scientists about specific projects which are live. The majority of our work is project based and built on assisting the client teams in the business.
10am
To run the different modelling projects we are working on, communication with the client teams at Medialab is key so that we get all the relevant data needed. At the moment we are doing lots of attribution work for a variety of clients, where we unpick the relationship of unattributed conversions to media. This means I need to understand the campaigns that have gone live to help client teams optimise campaigns efficiently.
Midday
I always make sure I leave my desk to stretch my legs at this time or most likely use it as an excuse to get another coffee. Since working remotely, I’ve tried all the local coffee shops in area (for anyone living in the Wandsworth area, I highly recommend visiting Bonsai Espresso Room!)
We currently have a company initiative called the ‘Lunch Laps Pledge’ which motivates us all to get outside particularly during lunch hours and log our walks/runs/cycles. It’s a win-win situation as we have a company target of 20,000 miles and once we reach that, Medialab will donate £2000 to a charity that we have all voted for internally.
12.30pm
It’s Mental Health Awareness Week this week, and we’ve got a lot going on internally to support this. For example, we have lunchtime drop-in sessions running all week where anyone in the company can book time in with one of Medialab’s Mental Health Allies, if they are struggling with their mental health or just need/want to talk to someone confidentially.
Earlier this year 8 members of Medialab, including myself became fully qualified Mental Health Allies, and since then all line managers have had mental health awareness training too. I found the whole experience very eye opening as mental health been even more of a struggle for a number of people, especially over the past year.
2pm
This afternoon I am dedicating a few hours to one of our current client projects. I’m using statistical techniques to analyse the data which has come from our in-house marketing intelligence platform, Apollo – a technology which turns data in to insights we can act on.
It’s a big job but Apollo does a lot of the heavy lifting for us so I can spend more time on the insightful analysis and recommendations which will be visualised in Apollo for our clients and the account teams to use.
4pm
I have a meeting booked in with one of our charity clients. It’s a learning session so that we can listen to and understand their challenges. We gather information from the clients in order to put together a scope of work so we can use the data to answer any key questions to solve their problems.
One of my favourite things about my job is working with clients to educate and help them use data in an insightful way to plan and buy media.
Evening
Now that we’re finally able to go to the pub or out for dinner, I’ll be heading out and about to meet up with my mates in person, although I have enjoyed cooking with housemates and watching a ridiculous amount of TV over the lockdown period.
If you weren’t working at Medialab, what would be doing?
I think I’d be a Teacher – probably a Maths teacher in a secondary school to look after Year’s 7-10. I love kids and also numbers, so this would be the best of both worlds!