Industry or Academic (Q&A)
Last Saturday, Taiwanese Professional in Germany invited me for sharing the experience from academic to industry. That is my pleasure sharing together with Yu-Kai and Guo-Jun. Some questions were mentioned during the talk, but we don't have enough time to response. This post is the response for the remaining questions.
Guo-Jun also wrote some responses concerning the PhD life as below (in Chinese)
And last but not least! Special thanks for Sam & Mia for inviting me and organizing the whole event!
Data Science Related
Q: Are there any data science methods used to assist in the production of drugs? (請問在藥物製成中有使用Data science 方法輔助嗎？)
A: As far as I know, there are several main Data areas in Pharma industry
- Before Clinical Trial:
The might be the part of drug discovery. I have joined a meetup in Bayer. One of the researcher really impressed me. They use Deep learning in denovo drug design
They use graph network to describe the distance of the atom within the compound, and try to simulate the result. (This is what I can say…I am not the expert)
Apart of that, there are some biotech company focus on genetic treatment, knowledge based AI. They find some connection between genes for the treatment. There are some companies in Berlin, for example Silence Therapeutics
2. For Clinical trial:
This is the area really need to under the supervision under regulatory affairs, like FDA, EMA. I take a figure from https://topkaos.com/clinical-data-management/
Just like Yu-Kai said, this need to be as routine as possible, because this is life-matter industry. So as a Data Manager, you need to clean data to certain FDA standard in order to send the application to FDA. It is called Clinical_Data_Interchange_Standards_Consortium (CDISC) format.
As a biostatistician, you need to do a lot of small data analysis with traditional statistical analysis, e.g. power analysis, survival analysis, experimental design, time series analysis. People in this field used SAS most, some use R. I would say, this is related conservative world specific for STATs. But talking about the working environment, it is quite open, for example, home office is a very common practice there even long time before corona.
3. Others:
Nothing special, just marketing, supply chain, they all need analysis data
Q: I would like to know the employment status of data scientists during the epidemic. (想知道在疫情期間data scientist的就業狀況～)
A: Hard.
As far as I know, there are a lot of good Data scientist got fired recently Especially in travel-related company, for example, VW, airbus. Compare to the other tech department, like software, Data science department is not the front line. That means, it is a good-to-have department, when the business getting bigger, it is good to have a department to analysis the data and reduce some cost, but not the department to earn the money. So you can imagine, that is the first department to cut in the financial crisis
Q: 以Data Scientist 這裡有什麼特別重要的技能嗎?
A: Please join our Taiwanese-Germany Data Science group, you can find some useful information there.
Career related
Q: If I change jobs soon after I find my first job (for example, after one year), will it affect my application for a blue card or permanent residence? (找到第一份工作之後很快(例如一年之後)就換工作的話，會影響到藍卡或永居的申請嗎？)
A: No, totally not. There is nothing to do with VISA.
Q: I heard that some people use job hopping to increase salary (and then jump back to the original company) / Will it affect salary accumulation if they keep changing jobs? (聽說有一些人用Job hopping來提升薪水(然後最後再跳回原本公司) / 若是一直換工作，是否會影響薪資累積)
A: Salary for me is NOT the most important thing of switching job. The personal career development is for me more important. Can I learn more in my current position? Can this environment provide me more opportunity to grow both in business and technique? Does the industry/position fit my career path plan? Is the vision of the company fit my value?
For the first job after the school, people does not have much choice. But when you get more and more experience, you will know what you really like, what you don’t like.
If you want to discuss about salary, I would like to recommend you to see a video from Joshua Fluke. He has a very good point concerning the salary in switching job.
By the way, I like Josh very much, he has a lot of good view point regarding to work! For example, He said, Don't think Company is family, you family will not fire you when you need the salary; the beautiful office with food supply, ps4, wii is a trap. The most important is, I finish my work 8 hrs, done, good bye. I don't want to stay office overnight
Hope this help! if you have further question, don't hesitate to contact me!
