Twice weekly, I share proven strategies to help data scientists get noticed, promoted, and valued. No theory — just practical steps to transform your technical expertise into business impact and the freedom to call your own shots.
How My Childhood Hobby Predicted My Data Science Career Breakthrough
|
When I was 9, I didn’t want to be a data scientist. I wanted to be a radio host. My favourite “game” involved recording episodes of my radio show using an old cassette recorder and blank audio tapes. I would bring on my family and stuffed animals for interviews, then cut to my favourite songs - sometimes sung (badly) by me. So, when I launched Value Driven Data Science three years ago, I saw it as a great way to learn from data scientists I admired, while living out my childhood dream. What I didn’t expect was how much the podcasting itself would enhance my data science skills. Conducting good interviews requires many of the same skills that make data scientists effective:
Without realizing it, I was practicing these skills every week through my podcast. This is a perfect example of how activities outside data science can strengthen the very skills we need for our careers. Actuary and data scientist Colin Priest discovered something similar through his own hobbies of dancing and swimming. In the latest Value Boost episode of Value Driven Data Science, Colin joins me to share his experiences in how seemingly unrelated activities can make you a more effective data scientist, including:
Your next career breakthrough might be hiding in your weekend plans. Listen now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or click the link below: Episode 91: How Your Hobbies Can Supercharge Your Data Science Career Talk again soon, Dr Genevieve Hayes. p.s. I'm opening spots in my Strategic Expert Mentorship program starting in February 2026. This isn't a technical skills course. It's 1-on-1 mentorship for data professionals who want to make the move from technical executor to strategic expert. Between now and Christmas, I'm making time to talk with people who want to know more. Interested? 👉 Book Your Call Now |
Data Science Impact Algorithm
Twice weekly, I share proven strategies to help data scientists get noticed, promoted, and valued. No theory — just practical steps to transform your technical expertise into business impact and the freedom to call your own shots.
Data scientists love to jump straight to machine learning. New problem? Throw data at a neural network. See what happens. But there’s a foundational step that, in the right circumstances, can dramatically increase your chances of project success - and most data scientists skip right over it. Mathematical modelling from first principles. I’m talking about physics here. Mass conservation. Energy conservation. Newton’s laws of motion. The stuff you find in high school physics textbooks. In this...
Around age 19, having just graduated high school, I got my first job in "data". I could barely use Excel and thought Python was something you'd find at the zoo, but a friend of the family hired me to tutor their teenaged son. My maths was good enough to help him get through high school maths. Around age 29, having just finished my PhD, I landed a role managing an insurance pricing and analytics team. I'd never heard the term "machine learning" back then, but I had spent a good chunk of the...
You’re already using optimisation every day as a data scientist - but you probably don’t think about it. Every time you train a machine learning model, you’re running an optimisation algorithm to find the best parameters. But there’s a second type of optimisation that most data scientists never even touch - and it’s where the real business value often lives. It’s called decision optimisation, and it can transform your ML predictions into actionable decisions. Here’s the difference: ML...