Elisabeth Smith

Current Employer/Organisation Name

Inov8 Consulting

What have you been doing since leaving Exeter, and what are you doing now?

Since leaving Exeter, I joined a tech startup, which I worked at for about 18 months, being the sole data person in my product section. At the moment I am working as a Senior Consultant for a Cloud and Data consultancy, consulting into financial services.

Why did you choose this career? And what do you enjoy most about your work?

After leaving Exeter, I decided I wanted to focus on working with data. I enjoy finding solutions to problems but also find data ethics and governance pretty interesting. I enjoy working with people from different technical and non-technical backgrounds and helping them to understand the data problem and solution.

What did you enjoy most about your programme and what was the biggest highlight?

I enjoyed the diversity of the programme. Previous to joining the degree I had no technical background, and the different topics and courses taught helped me decide what I wanted to do after graduation. I’d say the biggest highlight was one of my lecturers, I always enjoyed attending her lectures and I felt she was really engaging and provoked a lot of after thought.

What did you most enjoy about studying here?

Meeting different students from across the country, I was on a degree apprenticeship programme therefore we all lived and worked in different places. I learnt a lot from my peers at university and I would say some of them were pivotal to my success in my degree.

What skills and experiences have been most useful for your career?

Probably the data analytical skills I learnt as part of the degree, but even the wider topics has helped my understanding of real world problems.

What advice would you give to a current student who wishes to pursue your career?

Stay open minded, I didn’t know what I wanted to pursue during the course. Originally I wanted to go into software engineering, but after a couple DA lectures I quickly learnt that I had a passion for understanding data problems and the real world problems we see around us everyday are often attributed to lack of quality data, or people misunderstanding stats.

What are your plans for the future?

I want to work as a consultant for a while, I enjoy the ability to go into a large firm, complete the work, and then leave. Possibly in the future I may go self employed, but I think that is a long way off at the moment.