Two students have been hired to work alongside London Met lecturer Sandra Fernando on a major data analysis project, giving them real-life work experience alongside their degrees.
Date: 02 June 2021
A new London Met research project, led by Senior Lecturer Sandra Fernando, will use Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education data (DLHE) to analyse students' employability and graduate outcomes in the subject area of Computer Science and Applied Computing.
Following the award of £3000 of funding, two students in Computer Science and Applied Computing have been hired to develop this project and analyse the DLHE data, using their knowledge of data analytics.
One of these students, PhD candidate Subeksha Shrestha, explained her motivation for getting involved in the research. She said, "Analysing data and getting lucrative outputs and visualising the results on charts or graphs has fascinated me ever since I learnt how to work on them during my MSc. I always looked for opportunities to get involved in projects that are real-time based, so I can implement my studies and research practically and improve my skills.
Asked why it is important that students get real-life work experience alongside their research, Subeksha said, "for students like me, it is not just a line to get on your CV but a great opportunity to prepare for similar roles in the future.
"This kind of work experience would make students more confident in working with data, working in a team and learning about the importance of reporting on time and meeting deadlines. It’s almost like a taster session which gives students a clear understanding on whether they would like to take a similar job after completing their course or not.
"My experience working on this project has greatly improved my skills in reporting, working with data and in research, performing analysis on the quality of data, and visualising results using various libraries in Python. After my PhD I plan to work as a Data Analyst and help a business improve their insights by analysing any existing records or data, preparing a predictive model, and building analytical solutions using various tools and techniques."
Sandra Fernando said, "The types of skills that Subeksha mentions can be gained from a specialised degree programme such as Data Science BSc. Various modules in the Data Science programme build student skills in finding solutions to domain-specific problems using data science.
"Modules such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Big Data Visualisation, Data analytics and Programming with Data are designed with the most up to date tools and techniques for complex data processing, pattern recognition, model prediction."
