Hi there. Glad to be creating this blog and writing my first post, just 2 weeks from the end of my maternity leave. I have spent a good chunk of this leave feeling like I am rotting away, while also trying hard to make an impact in my personal life and show up for my two sons. I keep reminding myself, over and over, that this "career break" is for the best, and honestly, I am elated to have been fully there for my kids, nurturing them the best way I know how.
That said, I had a list of fairly personal things I wanted to tick off during this year-long leave, and I'm nowhere near 30% of the way through it. Life threw me some curveballs. But yeah, I'm happy I got to fully show up as a mother to my lovely kids. Anyway, here I am, 2 weeks to go, ticking off one more item on that list.
Hi again, I am Sola. I'm a data scientist with over 9 years of experience, and a passion for numbers and turning complex data sets into insights that can be visualized, using them to make predictions that support decision-making.
My journey started around age 15, when my parents enrolled me in a computer training school where I learnt the Microsoft Office package: Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher. I loved numbers even then, so my love for Excel grew and has kept blossoming. Since, I have worked across different organisations, learning to think fast on my feet and get creative with data. I have built predictive models for large organisations and dashboards for small businesses to help them visualize their growth metrics. For confidentiality reasons, I can not go too deep into most of that work. but I can talk at length about my PhD, where I built and evaluated machine learning models to predict how well treatment systems remove contaminants from wastewater before it's discharged into the environment, factoring in things like season and system design.
Welcome to my blog. I'll be publishing different projects I'm working on, alongside little snippets of my personal life, though I'd like to keep things fairly "professional" here.