Interview met Julia Linde | Whayle

Julia Linde is not only a data scientist who works at Whayle, but also a UvA alumnus. In this interview, Julia talks about her journey within Whayle and opportunities for students to get more acquainted with the company.

 

Nice to meet you, Julia! Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is Julia Linde, and I'm 25 years old. Since I started as a working student during my studies, I've been working at Whayle for three and a half years now. I studied econometrics at the University of Amsterdam, so I was also a member of the VSAE. Now I work 36 hours a week, and I cycle to work every day unless I work from home, which I usually do for one or two days a week.

 

Could you tell us more about Whayle and your role within the company?

Whayle is a company that mainly focuses on data science within the insurance industry. We try to combine data science with domain expertise. I work as a data scientist, and I've worked on several customer projects where I tried to solve problems for the customers using data science. At the moment, I'm working on one project and doing some internal tasks at the same time; that's a good balance for me because I can switch between two kinds of work to keep challenging myself.

 

What do you like about working at Whayle?

What I like a lot is the flexibility we have at our work; for example, we could choose what time to start working ourselves. Something I also like is that the people here are all really kind and we are a close and fun team. We are a very young company, and most of our colleagues are below 35 years old. There are a lot of former VSAE members who have worked here, so when I started as a working student, there were already some people I knew and there were only more VSAE members to come. Last week we had our first alumni borrel. It was great to see previous co-workers again, and some old VSAE members as well.

 

You mentioned that a lot of your colleagues are doing inspiring things besides their work. What are the other things you are passionate about?

I like to see my friends a lot. Besides that, I really like sports; I work out a lot and I'm a sports instructor besides my work at Whayle. On Thursday evenings, I’m giving spinning lessons at a gym nearby. We have a lot of sporty colleagues, as many of them have followed one of my spinning classes. I like to see everybody happy with what I taught, and I hope to do some more classes in the future.

 

What was your experience like as a working student at Whayle?

I have already participated in a client project during my working student period, and it made me feel that I was part of the team. I was able to be in contact with the customers and to actually experience what it would be like to work at Whayle full-time. Also, I got the opportunity to write my thesis here. I built a language model which predicts the probability that a patient could be healthy again and reintegrate into their working life, and I was really happy to have this opportunity.

 

Is there something you and your team do differently that makes the company unique?

We are all unique individuals and have different approaches to work, so we can learn a lot from each other. We always work on a project as a team, so our different ways of working strengthen each other in the process. Furthermore, we are also working on our own development; every employee at Whayle has a “buddy”, with whom you discuss about for example, how you feel in the company and what about yourself you want to improve. We also give each other feedback, which helps in developing and improving yourself.

 

What are the things you only learned at work after graduation?

I think the main thing is working with real big data. In university, data was perfectly structured while at work, data cleaning is already a whole project in itself; I also have to be in contact with the customer a lot before the dataset is ready to be used.

 

Could you give some advice to students that are interested in working at Whayle?

Whayle focuses mostly on the insurance industry, and we also apply data science a lot within the industry. Therefore, if you're interested in doing that, you could definitely come by to grab a coffee and have a chat with us. Moreover, if you want to know what it's like to work at our company, you are welcome to visit our in-house day on June 13^th. We will prepare a case for you, so that you could meet other students and work together with our colleagues. It would be nice to see you there, so save the date if you are interested in Whayle! You could sign up on our website using this link: https://whayle.nl/inhousedag_hersenstichting/.