IBA Alumni Interview #1
As a consultant for Capgemini Invent for over two years now, looking back on my student life brings back fun memories.
I started IBA in 2011 and was extremely active in terms of doing committees. Eventually I did a board year at Asset, where I took the opportunity to improve the programme. Looking back, that is without a
doubt the highlight of my time in Tilburg. Largely my work remained invisible, but it was the perfect way to give back to the programme and help students.
IBA proved not only to be fun, but also a good starting point of my career. Nowadays, I still use plenty of what was taught in my everyday work, yet the biggest lesson was working with a wide set of students. Presently, I also cannot always choose who I work with or for, but I’m prepared to deal with these situations in a proper way.
After IBA, the tech nerd in me became interested in the hype around data science, so I decided to study the master Data Science: Business & Governance, which was back then newly offered in Tilburg. I decided it was time to increase my focus on hard skills rather than soft skills and be up to date on this new phenomenon. And that works: as a consultant I work on typical business projects, and numerous of these requires new skills to be solved.
When I was almost finished with my master, it was time to look for a job. Through events and visits, I met plentiful firms and it helped me greatly by finding out what I did and didn’t like. Yet the crucial part to finding a job, proved to be having a network. I got into my current role through a friend when I called him on a lazy Friday afternoon.
Currently, I am building a tool -a predictive model- to enable a real data-driven capacity planning for all local offices for a client in financial services. It helps to answer questions such as: when to hire additional people or plan trainings, or what is the impact of increased efficiency. It’s a good example of a classical business problem requiring ‘data science’ skills, connecting the choices I’ve made.
As a student, I should have been more curious and eager. I sometimes was too occupied that I forgot to
look around and focus on what really inspires me. It’s for that:
Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
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