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I started my PhD at IMAU in 2017 with Erik van Sebille, working on plastic transport in the ocean. After graduation, I found the perfect, meaningful and challenging job that I always dreamed of, which I have been doing ever since. Well, that’s what I would like to write. But it turned out differently.

My first job outside academia was in sustainability consulting as a data analyst, followed by a data scientist role at a small energy startup. Both positions initially required me to learn completely new concepts, which I loved. However, the learning curve quickly flattened, and the work became more repetitive and less creative over time. I have always enjoyed technical challenges in math or programming, and I realized that I needed such challenges to stay motivated. This led me to quit both jobs after a year each.

I then started to work as a maths teacher at a German university of applied sciences. Teaching was fun, but the salary was low, and there was no development perspective in the job. As I learned, I could not become a Professor there due to my lack of sufficient work experience outside of academia. I realised that I had to step back and properly think about my options. With two little kids, I also wanted to find something a bit more stable. At least for a while.

After some contemplation, I started a new job in 2023. I am now working as a system engineer and data scientist for hydrogen fuel cells at cellcentric in southern Germany. What I love about my job is that I found a real technical challenge. We have a tremendous amount of high-dimensional time series data from sensors, a real playground for any physicist or data scientist. I also develop software functionalities that go on the control unit of our trucks, so I really see the result of my work in practice. Additionally, I really like that I can contribute to something useful – the decarbonization of transport.

Although I still enjoy my job, I recently made a dream come true: I started my own data science company! I support companies with their data analysis, focusing on engineering cases where black-box machine learning models are often useless. Currently, I am doing this in parallel with my main job, but who knows where the next few years will take me.

David Wichmann