Soft skills
One communicating skill that the company seeks is the ability to work with partners on engineering, product, and business teams. At U of T, I have taken many statistics courses that involve group projects. By working in groups, I have developed strong communication skills. In STA304, there were two group assignments which I collaborated with teammates to discuss about data cleaning, organizations of report, and model selections. Another communicating skill sought by the company is communicating key insights to stakeholders. I have practiced this skill by making presentations in statistics courses. In STA130, the final project involved presenting the report in an environment similar to science fair. Within a time limit, my team presented our reports to professors and students and focused on the most important aspects of reports.
Analytics skills
The company requires some analytics skills related to R, two of which are cleaning codes and making ggplots. In statistics courses at U of T, I not only have learnt theories and concepts but also have practiced the use of R and RStudio. For instance, I had done a data exploration assignment about COVID-19 data of Toronto in STA303. Throughout the assignment, I performed data cleanings to make sure the sample data sets were tidy and combined different data sets for analysis. Meanwhile, I also made ggplots to show number of COVID-19 cases each day by status and types of outbreaks.
Connection to studies
My professional development activity is learning GitHub, and the evidences produced from this activity involve my personal repository on GitHub. In the repository, I would present projects and writings that I have done in STA303. However, instead of merely uploading my works to the repository, I would write about my reflections of these assignments and introduce them to whoever looks at my repository. Thus, by working on my professional development activity, I strengthen the communication skills by presenting my journey in STA303 to others in a meaningful way. Besides the professional development task, I would continue to develop the skills of model selections and statistical inferences by learning course materials and attending lectures. These skills are also essential for data scientists. The final project of STA303 would be a great opportunity and evidence of demonstrating my skills.