Nathan (Shihao) Zhang
Primary area of practice
Data Analytics
About My Role
“Work from every aspect to prepare the information or material needed according to the need of our clients”
Findex has a newly established portal which is a tool for delivering intelligence and advice to clients. Our job includes importing the data from clients into the portal, doing manipulation and calculations, and producing text, numerical or graphical output.
Apart from these, I am responsible for preparing slides for the team leader, who will illustrate the feature of our portals and how useful it is to our clients, for the purpose of encouraging them to purchase the subscription. Sometimes, I might even conduct research and produce a report of key findings for other departments such as the marketing team, since there is a lot of area of work in common.
What do I like most about my role?
The best thing for me is the working atmosphere. Everyone collaborates so well and does their individual part efficiently. There is a 20-minute meeting for the data science group at the start of every day, in which each member would summarize what he/she did in the previous day, if there is any problem, and most importantly, which part is challenging and the potential help from others are needed.
There is also great flexibility in using the software, for example, I used Excel to calculate the potential total benefit to be claimed for all the clients because I didn’t know anything about coding software at that time. I am grateful to my colleagues who are experienced in software use and helped me to get familiar with everything needed.
How has my experience at university applied to my role?
I won’t say there are many methods, equations or problem-solving techniques from the university that could be applied directly at the workplace, however, knowing the basics better certainly helps. For example, I probably didn’t use too many excel functions from the statistic class, however, the logic developed from the learning would help me study new functions quicker, or at least enable me to know how to find/study the new functions. Therefore, you might want to pay more attention to the areas that are not “examinable”, because they could be more useful than the “compulsory knowledge”.
Recommendations I have for students interested in my role
Study as much as you can, try to develop and extend your knowledge with google, YouTube or any other external resource, practice them and then you will gain some advantage since most others might not be interested in digging in those areas.