Tola Alade is extremely driven. She is working as a data scientist at Lloyds Banking Group, worked very hard to get there and absolutely loves what she does. “I really enjoy working here. It’s phenomenal. I’ve grown significantly,” she said.
She is clearly fascinated by data because even as we start the interview she mentioned that she had a data problem at work that she is mulling over. “It’s really bugging me. I like going home and thinking ‘how am I going to solve that?’”
But before all of this, when she was a student with A levels in maths, physics and IT, preparing for university, she knew she wanted to graduate with a first class degree. So took the subject she enjoyed the most: maths. She and her siblings had been encouraged from an early age to develop a curiosity about numbers and her dedication to get a top grade meant that she spent most of her time at university in the library and was very close with her professors and lectures.
In fact, she had started out at City, University of London studying maths and computer science but when she realised that the computer science modules would drag down her grade, she decided to drop it and transferred to Queen Mary, University of London. There she started her straight maths degree in the second year and just took a few additional first-year modules to catch up. Her hard work and strategizing paid off as she did indeed attain a first class degree.
She went to work at an energy management company but didn’t enjoy it. “I was working as a data analyst. It wasn’t challenging. I didn’t feel like I was learning anything,” she said. After six months she went to work at Rightmove as a data analyst where she says her career in analytics really started.
She had mountains of data to play (or work) with from estate agents and prospective renters and buyers. However, she became hot-footed and decided that she really wanted to travel. It was a bold move as she was not able to take a six-month sabbatical and so was forced to quit to indulge her wanderlust in 2014. This leap of faith turned out to be a pivotal point in her career.
Travelling became expensive and so she tried teaching English in Thailand but that lasted all of one day. Alade then took a job in Australia at a recruitment company, sourcing people to work in data and analytics companies. She arranged to meet a data scientist, one of her targets, for a coffee and was blown away by the enthusiastic and passionate way he talked about his job, and that he could apply theoretical mathematical concepts, like eigenvalues and eigenvectors, in a work environment.
"Hearing that mathematical concepts are used in data science got me interested."
“He just spoke about his job and I never met someone that actually loved what they did and was happy being in a role. He said ‘the work is awesome, the challenges are different and I like the fact that there isn’t one solution for everything’. When he started talking about the mathematical concepts that are being used in data science, that got me interested.”
Alade began researching the role and coincidentally was contacted by her old manager at Rightmove asking if she wanted her old job back. She agreed and returned in June 2015 and a few months later became a statistical analyst where she could incorporate data science into her role. “That worked well because Rightmove just bought this company called The Outside View and they were mostly machine learning focused and they had phenomenal data scientists that were working on some products for Rightmove,” she said.
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