Getting ahead in the job market

How an industry placement helped Kate New secure her future career.

Kate’s SCDTP research into managing flood risk led to her getting a headstart in the employment market and securing a position with UK national mapping agency Ordnance Survey.

Kate says the experiences she gained from her PhD in Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Southampton and her placement at Ambiental Risk Analytics, in Brighton, have been invaluable to her in her new role as a Data Scientist at Ordnance Survey.

While at Ambiental Risk Analytics she created a prototype of an enhanced flood risk index using Ambiental’s data and her own research knowledge to identify properties at risk of being cut-off in a flood event. The information generated from this prototype has the potential to increase awareness of flood risk for homeowners, businesses, and local government, and help them to become better prepared for any potential disruption caused by flooding.

The internship helped her apply theory from research to real world problems, understand customer requirements and the tools and data needed to meet them, and build prototype workflows and data products to demonstrate what is possible, which gave her the experience to draw upon to hit the ground running when she started at Ordnance Survey.

She says that when she was applying for jobs, having the internship working in a geospatial business on her CV, combined with her specialist knowledge from her PhD, strengthened her applications.

“My internship provided invaluable experience when I was applying and interviewing for jobs, as I could demonstrate I had skills in working on innovative projects with business customers to achieve outcomes.”

Dr Kate New

Data Scientist, Ordnance Survey