Amla Srivastava worked as a McKinsey & Company analyst before she enrolled in the M.S. in data science program through the Data Science Institute at Columbia University (DSI). She landed internships with a data science team at NBCUniversal and in the auto insurance division of Hartford Insurance during her studies and was hired by Bloomberg as a data scientist when she graduated in 2017. Here, she discusses her work and offers DSI students tips on how to prepare for interviews and secure top internships and jobs in the current market. 

What were some of the highlights of your DSI experience? 

The highlight of the program for me was the opportunity to meet and work with bright, ambitious students from around the world and learn from world-renowned academicians. My favorite courses were Applied Machine Learning with Andreas Mueller and Natural Language Processing with Kathleen McKeown. Both courses were very relevant and practical, with content that I continued to refer to even after starting my job.

Tell us about your primary responsibilities in your current role.

My team at Bloomberg is set up to help internal teams within the sales, marketing, and product divisions better utilize their data to enhance service to our clients. I primarily work with large volumes of customer data from our terminal business to build machine learning systems for real-time workflow recommendations, text classification, and user targeting for marketing campaigns as well as anomaly detection. My role encompasses end-to-end project design and implementation as well as working in collaboration with our data engineers and software developers to productionize and maintain our models.

Can you describe any of your projects?

One of my main projects has been building out a recommendation engine for the terminal that shows real-time suggestions for what functionality clients should use next based on their user types and their current workflows. This is currently used by 300,000+ users worldwide. I also help teams target users for different email/ad/calling campaigns based on who would be most likely to adopt a certain feature. In addition, I’ve worked with large-scale text classification and anomaly detection for identification of errors or shifts in terminal/API usage patterns over time.

How did you secure this job with Bloomberg?

I applied to a variety of companies through DSI, Handshake, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor during my final semester. I also had a return offer from a previous internship. I was actually introduced to my current manager at Bloomberg, a Columbia Business School graduate, through a Columbia Data Science Society hackathon, where I was a finalist and he was one of the judges. One of my classmates from DSI, who was already working at Bloomberg, referred me to an opening on the team and I got the job!

Do you have any advice for current DSI students?

Know your strengths and interests well before applying for jobs. Review job descriptions carefully and ask several questions to understand the role and make sure it is a good fit for you. This will ensure that you don’t take a job you won’t enjoy. Also, pick up projects and research experience outside of the basic course requirements at DSI and make sure to network. The easiest place to start is reaching out to alumni through LinkedIn and DSI career services.

Which questions should students be prepared to answer during interviews?

Interviewers will not only ask you questions. They will want you to ask questions to show a genuine interest in working for the company and for the specific team. So before interviews, always read up on the team, the job requirements, and the firm’s vision. Also be prepared to discuss the projects listed on your resume—all the business considerations and technical aspects. And always view your class projects through the lens of what impact they would have in the real world. Don’t see them as just academic exercises. In addition, get sufficient coding practice for Python/R/SQL to get through initial screening interviews. In terms of overall knowledge, candidates for data science jobs will be expected to know and discuss key concepts such as probability theory, basic stats, hypotheses testing, and A/B testing in addition to ML/NLP/deep learning concepts.

Do you have advice for current students who are job hunting in the coronavirus job market?

Bloomberg continues to hire talent even during these troubled times. We have several openings in data science/machine learning/data engineering/software engineering. The company’s career page is the best place to get updated information on job openings. From what I’ve seen, big companies are continuing to hire and are getting creative with the interviewing process. Keep applying. More people will be working from home, so this is a good time to reach out through LinkedIn, etc., to connect. Opportunities through DSI will be more important than ever. This is also a great time to practice and solidify your core skills. Even in the current situation, the ability to extract insight from data continues to be valuable and continues to create demand for data scientists—the so-called ‘sexiest’ job of the 21st century.

— Robert Florida