Wayan Rezaldi Widyanatha
Wayan’s Story from Urban Development and River Study to Data Scientist
Meet one of the finalists of ASEAN DSE, Wayan, who journeys through creating data-driven proposals to landing a spot as a data scientist in a state-owned bank in Indonesia. His journey starts within his late college life when he joined ASEAN DSE when he becomes determined to pursue his career in the spot of a data scientist.
Wayan started like everyone, a student studying in university who wants to experience the thrill of joining a tough competition. ASEAN DSE was an experience that opened his eyes not only for his future career but his understanding of his capabilities. He did not join knowing that his team will be the national finalist. Initially, he hoped to learn more about data science and ASEAN’s initiatives towards UN SDGs, but once he thrust himself into the pool of competition, he can develop better intuition of data searching, technicalities of extracting data-driven information and deliver a killer presentation. Wayan and his teammate chose to focus on urban development and river study because he believed that the topic is rarely talked about and made aware of the importance of clean rivers to urbanization. He experienced a couple of hurdles during storyboard development. One of the most prominent ones is collecting the data. As the topic his team chose is not widely popular, it’s hard for them to attain good data to analyse. Moreover, he experienced hardship in picking the most effective and fun way to present the data for the general population. However, after overcoming the puddles along the road he realized that his solution is worth the shot to be implemented as the clouds clear up to see the real value of the work he and his teammate have made.
“We live in the information era in which there is abundance of information, yet we can’t always easily find the most important insights from this information. We are overwhelmed by information. Data scientist is coming to help.”, explained Wayan in our interview. He believes that the works that he does are the process to reach his goal of making use of the abundance of data in this information age into something beneficial to society. In this present day, Wayan is working as a data scientist in a state-owned bank in Indonesia as well as in the final stage of his data science training. Currently, he is in charge to create a machine learning-based predictive model that is needed for his credit card team. Since the machine is in the prototype stage his work cycles in making proof of concepts, formulating strong business background, and identifying key problems that the solution is trying to solve. All of which will be presented in a PowerPoint presentation which his presentation skill obtained from ASEAN DSE comes to play.
As a final statement, the takeaway he got from participating in ASEAN DSE and working as an employee as a data scientist is the importance of understanding the problem and communication solution. Wayan believed that no matter how good the solution is or how well the data is obtained when a person, especially, a data scientist does not know the value of the problem, it will not go as well. Throughout his experience, he also wants to shed light on the importance of proper data-driven analysis to the ASEAN society. There is plenty of usage of data-driven analysis such as identifying problems, making efficient and accurate judgement and hypotheses, and proving the previous hypothesis with objective evidence. ASEAN society like other society in the world has many improvements to make, and taking the step to participate in ASEAN DSE and becoming a data scientist is a way for Wayan to put value in the problems he acknowledges to help create solutions to improve the lives of plenty.