New team member Sara!

Let us introduce you to a new member of our A Cloud Frontier team which is a young lady Sara. Sara is from Spain, freshly graduated from Math Science and she is full of passion to work with Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, CI/CD and all the exciting things around data.

Sara’s study

Hi Sara, nice to meet you and welcome in our team! At the beginning I would like to ask you why did you decide to study Math? Isn’t it still unusual for a girl to study Math or anything similar?

Thank you for having me! Well, lot of people think it is something unusual but, in my class, it was half – half. Half girls and half boys. I do not know how is it in another countries. Also, I know that Engineering or IT classes were full of boys but Mathematic was quite, let’s say, balanced. When I was at High School Math was quite easy for me, something natural. I was deciding between Mathematics and Physics, but I knew it would be something science related. And then I chose Mathematics.

You also did your Erasmus study in Finland. Why Finland and could you outline some differences between way of studying/teaching in Spain and Finland?

Well, I could choose between five places, I guess. The most important criteria for me were the cultural difference between my country and the Erasmus country and the level of education. Therefore, I had picked Finland. The culture is quite far from mine, also the educational standard is high. Besides, the content of study was not more challenging than in my country, but the way of learning was different. We had to participate more during the semester, had more interactions with our teachers and got some feedbacks in our courses, whereas in Spain we have to be more independent. It is up to us if we learn or not.

Also, in Finland we were around 10 people in the class while in Spain there were circa 40 people. Speaking about culture, here in Spain, the class usually consists of people of your age it means people after high school. In Finland it is different. The age range is more diverse. It means that my classmates where from 20 to let’s say 40 years old. It was visible that the people are used to educate themselves regardless the age and they get support from the state, obviously.

Sara’s new work at ACF

You are going to work with Great Expectation, could you explain a bit what is it about?

Well, since I am right after Uni, I do not have any special experience with it. But what I learnt so far it is a software where you can test your data, especially the quality of them. For example, if you are looking for data explaining the age of your customers, you know that your value cannot be negative number. Besides, you can sort them up from 0 to 100 for instance. It allows you to see if your data are correct and there is no error in your data.

What about GitHub and Dataiku. Do you have any experience with them?

I do not have much experience so far, but GitHub is famous within the IT community, so I know what it is about. I am really looking forward to learning more and working with it. About Dataiku, I know what the company does. Their solution is not only data warehouse, but it does the entire process there for data science. It loads the data, transforms, and enables you to build your ML model.

Would it be challenging for you to switch from Math to IT?

Well, it is not the first time I am doing programming since my Final Thesis was about Artificial Intelligence, especially Python. In Math everything keeps repeating I would say. Therefore, I started to get interested in Programming and IT in general. Also, during my study I took some programming courses that were enjoyable for me.

Moreover, when I came to Helsinki, I took a course Introduction to Artificial Intelligence which literally opened my eyes. The Professor of this course made it quite easy and understandable. We also made some robots which was amazing because previously I though it is something very difficult but in that time, I saw I can do it too. Based on that I got very interested into programming, AI and Machine Learning.

But of course, it will be most probably challenging since it is my first job, and my field of study was Math. Also, in the beginning, there are many new information and things that I had never seen before. But I will do my best to be a useful asset of the company.

Sara’s hobbies

Lets move to more leisure topic. What is your hobby? What do you like to do in your free time?

I have been dancing for many years now. Also, when I finished my degree in July, I wanted to take some break and I decided to dance every day. I like to travel too but it is quite difficult in current situation so I hope it will be easier again in the future.

Thank you, Sara, for sharing your experience with us. We are happy to know you better and welcome in the team!

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