S2E3 – Joana Wang

In the next episode of our series “the orthogonals”, where we showcase people who took a somewhat unusual path to data science, we spoke to Joana Wang.

Joana is a data aficionado with a passion for education. Her ambition is to help people demystify the world of data and make analytics second nature while having fun.

Having worked both in strategy consulting and industry, she’s had projects across retail & wholesale, supply chain and financial services. In her last 8 years of experience, she’s spent most of her time doing financial modelling, building bespoke data analytics products and wrangling data – a lot of it! This has required her to not only be able to technically develop solutions but also understand the wider business context and relate to people’s needs, which she tries to embed in her teaching style.

We spoke with Joana about a variety of topics including how to incorporate data science into the business world, the state of data science education, what skills you need to be a data scientist and which of those skills are easier to teach or can even be taught at all. To give you a teaser, she summarised this beautifully when she said “No amount of code is going to tell you how to think”.

Please enjoy our conversation with Joana.