All posts tagged with 'internship'
Wondering where the weeks went: a reminiscent reflection of my FreeAgent internship
It just seems like yesterday when I was settling in at FreeAgent and writing a blog about my first week as a FreeAgent data science intern. Yet here I am, having finished my internship and remembering all of the good times I had. Outside of my internship at FreeAgent, I am a PhD student specialising in veterinary biology, so the last 13 weeks have been a steep learning curve into… Continue reading
Accurately ascertaining attitudes: designing unbiased survey questions
It would be great if we knew exactly what our customers thought so that we could adapt our products and improve our performance. However, it isn’t possible to read the minds of our customers, so surveys are a popular alternative to understand their attitudes. Yet, if the answers recorded on surveys don’t truly reflect the attitudes of the customers, how can we really know how to improve? This blog post… Continue reading
Sourcing a suitable sample: understanding selection bias in survey data
During my time at FreeAgent, I have been analysing attitudinal customer survey data to predict their behaviour. Getting to the bottom of how exactly this data was collected has helped me to understand the data and has given me a few ideas about how the data could be collected in the future. This blog focuses on how we choose who is selected to take part in surveys: a process is… Continue reading
My Summer @ FreeAgent
Hi, I’m Struan. Nice to meet you. I’ve been working at FreeAgent over the summer as an Engineering Intern within the Workflow team and to round off my time here, I’ve written an Engineering Blog post about my internship, covering the main projects that I’ve been working on over the past three months. The Beginning My time at FreeAgent started off with meeting the Workflow team, my team for the… Continue reading
DevBots, squirrels and bouncing emails — just another intern’s summer
Over the last three months, I have had the wonderful opportunity to join FreeAgent’s Workflow team as an Engineering Intern. As the internship draws to an all-too-soon close, I’ll look back at some of the things I’ve been able to participate in this summer. Getting going When I entered the office on the first Monday morning, I was introduced to the other members of Workflow, where we were promptly whisked… Continue reading
Summer in the city: my data science internship at FreeAgent
During a wet and windy January afternoon, I was indulging in fantasies about summer, hot weather and holidays. Pulling me back to reality was the realisation that I’m not some jet-setting socialite but a university student lacking in work experience and fast approaching the end of their academic career! I only had one year before I’d be forced to crawl from under the comfort blanket that is student loans, friendly… Continue reading
Dealing with dirty data: useful functions for data cleaning in R
In this blog post, I’ll explain how to use some simple R-based data cleaning solutions (mostly in the ‘tidyverse’ package1) to address the most common dataset errors with the help of my favourite analogy: the untidy kitchen! NB: There are a plethora of valuable data cleaning tools in other software and even within R there are many different tools available. While the approach that I describe here is not necessarily… Continue reading
Clean house: clear mind. Clean data: clear findings.
Soon after settling in at FreeAgent and getting to grips with my role as a data science intern, I got the opportunity to present some of the data that I had been working on at a ‘town hall’, a company-wide weekly meeting where everyone gets together to present their work, share news and pitch ideas. The data I presented was attitudinal survey data from accountancy practices that had contracts with… Continue reading
Castles, canals and coffee: my first week as a FreeAgent data science intern
My regular job is as a PhD student specialising in veterinary biology but this summer I have an amazing opportunity to be a data science intern at FreeAgent. If you are wondering why a biologist came to work at an accountancy software company, this is because of the particular branch of biology that I study: ‘epidemiology’. An epidemiologist typically uses data to understand ‘the distribution and determinants of health-related states… Continue reading
Programming, Burgers, and Treasure: Summer with FreeAgent
This summer it has been my pleasure to join FreeAgent as a Data Engineering intern. Alongside the analytics and architecture teams, I have been working on a new exciting feature to complement the FreeAgent application. Programming mostly with Python, I have learned a great deal from my colleagues, and I wish to share the experience with you all here on the engineering blog. Since joining in early June, the intern… Continue reading