Data Spark is a student placement scheme at Imperial designed to uncover insights and solve real-world business problems. It lasts around 6 weeks and you’re able to work with students from different study programs. Throughout this journey, you get great advice from academic and industry mentors.
Having finalised the program last week, I wanted to share what I enjoyed the most:
Applying new skills
One of my favourite parts of this program was that I was able to apply several skills learned during my current study program (MSc Business Analytics). I was able to run different models, work on network analysis and and apply several visualisation techniques. These models led to several interesting insights that were relevant for our client.
This is now an example I can use to show the techniques I’ve learned and how I’ve applied them (very helpful when applying for jobs!).
Mentorship
My team and I had the great opportunity to work with Dr Rebecca Pope at KPMG as industry mentor and Dr David Birch as academic mentor. Their strong technical capabilities and consulting experience brought a lot of value to our team. We held weekly meetings that guided us on what technical analysis to perform and how to create a compelling story for our client. This was a unique experience to get close guidance on our work and ideas.
Team Work
We were five team members with different backgrounds and skills. We had different views and angles to solve problems. This became a great opportunity to learn from each other. At the same time, we could start developing project management skills to make sure that our collective work was meeting the project’s goals.
If you have any questions about the program, feel free to use the comments section below!
You can also find more information about this program here.
