In conversation with... Dr James Abdey, Associate Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Statistics speaks to LSE undergraduate and DSL columnist Kara Jessup and shares his insights on what skills employers feel LSE students should have....
Could you tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do at LSE?
I am an Associate Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Statistics. I was originally a PhD student x years ago(!) in the Department alongside being a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA), and while my original intention was to work in industry after the PhD, I fell in love with teaching. Those very classes I once taught on, I am now the lecturer of! I lecture a more theoretical first-year course that briefly makes use of R, and a more applied statistics course which references Excel.
I am also heavily involved with the School’s Extended Education unit, which covers the Summer School, University of London International Programmes and various online courses.
In your job as a lecturer, but also in your past experiences, how have you used digital skills and how have they helped you?
One growth area I like to look at and I find interesting is data visualisation. In the last two or three years, the prominence of “data viz” has certainly increased: take COVID charts for instance. I would like to think that one of the (few) positives of the pandemic is that more people are now able to read a graph, which is incredibly important to help make sense of the world.
A good grounding in Excel and Tableau is a great foundation for this. Before progressing to things such as Python, R and SQL, knowing Tableau and Excel is highly desirable to have a solid base. Working with dashboards can also look very pretty – it’s an art as much as a science - all while communicating vast quantities of data in an easy to digest format.
Having worked on various consultancy projects, what specific advice would you have for students looking to enter the consultancy sector (digital skills related or not)?
When I was a PhD student, one of the big management consultancies held an event specifically targeted at PhDs. I was curious about why a management consultancy would want someone pursuing a PhD in statistics, so I went along. I was almost persuaded by a career in consulting because it was all about problem-solving on behalf of the clients. They were interested in PhD candidates because they wanted multidisciplinary teams in which everyone has their expertise and their weaknesses. I love numerical problems, but then thinking about impacts in more of a commercial or public sector context was less of my forte.
Consulting more generally requires problem-solving in teams and working with such variety of bespoke problems. It’s lovely to be able to apply what can seem like academic and abstract ideas to the real world. If you’re comfortable with having to think outside the box, or think outside the boxplot if you will(!), you enjoy trying to solve problems, manage differences of opinion and you have that sort of intellectual curiosity, then consulting may be a career path to explore.
What skills would you recommend focusing on for students looking to get a quantitative PhD?
Let’s think about the journey: you go from undergraduate to Masters to PhD. Master’s is not just another year of undergraduate, there is a significant jump. Likewise when going from a Master’s to PhD because you are having to do research rather than go to classes and take exams. This is why, for anyone considering a PhD, I would strongly recommend that you undertake a dissertation as part of your Master’s degree, because that is a new and very unstructured way of learning. You have to answer questions that no-one has been able to, or has not been bothered to answer previously, and this can lead to a lot of dead ends and requires bucket loads of resilience and perseverance.
If you had one piece of advice to offer students while they’re still here at LSE what would it be?
First of all, from a purely academic perspective, I have two top exam tips: Read the full question and show your method! In quantitative subjects, it isn’t just about getting the answer, it’s about understanding the causes of things, to come back to the LSE motto. What an examiner wants to know is not the answer, but to understand how the answer has been derived.
More generally, I would say that LSE has a reputation for being very academically rigorous, and that’s very important. However, I have seen something from various Careers Service events where I have been able to ask top employers what they like about LSE students, versus what they thought could be improved. On the positive side, they liked the academic rigour that LSE instils in students, but on the downside, they said that LSE students can sometimes lack soft skills like communication, teamwork, being able to stand up and give a presentation etc. So I would say, don’t neglect the soft skills. Don’t expect your academic modules to heavily focus on those skills, immerse yourself in the life of the School, societies, clubs, etc., in order to be able to work and collaborate with people effectively. Overall, I think that’s a winning combination!