The people that spoke was Ben Arancibia a data scientist senior manager from GSK and Jasper Lu from TripAdvisor. GSK is based in the UK and is a large pharmaceutical. Ben got a degree in International Relations in 2011. He focused on GIS while his time at William and Mary. He got a graduate certificate in GIS from VCU after William and Mary. He became a GIS developer for some time. He got into management consulting for 8 years. He got his masters in data science up in New York. He focused on cyber security and does applied machine learning for some of his work. Jasper was also class of 2011 and double majored in economics and math. He got masters in mathematical fiancé and Vanderbilt. He originally wanted to do finance and got a job as a pricing analyst in Boston. Learned about pricing and how insurance works. He wanted to do something different and got a job at Wayfair to do pricing work for them. He looked at trends and supply and demand. He was at Wayfair for 5 years. He do the product performance side as well at Wayfair. He did product recommendations related to customers going to the website and products you want to show them. Each product has its own unique features and tried to look at trends. Then he went to TripAdvisor to do data science for flights, cars, and cruise business. They wanted to build their data science and analytics power. TripAdvisor was impacted by COVID and Jasper was laid off. He has an offer with Shopify who is based in Canada. Ben talks about the past few months in pharmaceuticals and the impact COVID had. HE is in the biostatistics group and talks about the clinical trial data like pharmaceutical products and vaccines. The impacts of COVID has been difficult and left a lot of unanswered questions. Jasper talks about the impacts from his side and the uncertainty that came along with it. He talked about flight surges and increase of bookings before the lockdown and the steep drop during quarantine. It made a huge ripple effect that caused a lot of layoffs. The companies made deep cuts intentionally so they wouldn’t have to lay off more people later. They are starting to rehire for key positions now. Then they opened up the floor for people to ask questions. It was asked what are some crucial things for now that can help us looking for jobs in the near future. Jasper says there’s a lot of resources out there and get exposed to problems and how you approach that problem. Ben said knowing the type of data science you want to do and have your story crafted will help narrow your path. He also said have your tech skills down and know a lot of languages. He also said connections matter and network as much as possible. It was asked what is the interview process like. Ben said it depends on the sector you go into. They drill you on how would you solve certain problems. There’s a 3rd interview that’s a panel discussion and they look at strategic problem solving skills. Some people give homework and you solve an analytic problem. Some interviews do whiteboard exercises. It was asked what’s better to go straight to grad school or get job experience and then go to grad school. Jasper talks about their own experiences and the pros and cons. Ben was asked to talk more about his GIS experience. It was asked the importance of math in data science. Jasper being a math major gave his opinions. He talked about math is crucial to understand why the model is working because of the math behind it.