Fadwa's passion has always been numbers. When she was little and sitting at her school desk in Tangier, her home town, she found maths and physics fun. After completing her studies in Morocco, Fadwa moved to Paris after a two-year preparatory course in scientific subjects which opened the doors to the Faculty of Engineering. At Telecom ParisTech, she learned everything she could about telecommunications engineering, computer science and computer security. But it is during her first working experience in a company dedicated to research activities, calculating prices, making bookings and issuing tickets, that she discovered her vocation as a data scientist.
What do you love about your job as a data scientist?
“Studying and understanding data. Data analysis allows you to get to know the users and consumers of any business, to classify them into groups according to their interests and behaviour. It is a job that was once done by hand; today it can be done automatically thanks to machine learning. You can extract an infinite amount of information from just numbers, providing us with a photograph of who we are”.
How did you join Pirelli?
“After working in Paris and the French Riviera, my Italian husband and I decided to come and live in Italy. So I started looking for a job in Milan. I saw on Linked In that Pirelli was recruiting a data scientist so I applied”.
Is this a different experience from the others?
“For the first time at Pirelli I was confronted with data from a manufacturing business, as well as research and development. The approach does not change, but the contact persons change because you need to be in line with the business at all times. One of my first tasks was to estimate the yield of finished products. Car makers require certain standards for the tyres they fit to their cars. Our task is to predict the percentage tyres produced according to these standards, which varies according to the technical type of tyre.”
What does your team do at Pirelli?
“We are a group of data scientists, within the Data Management Department, which, in addition to us, includes a data engineering team and another business intelligence team. The job entails the constant analysis of data, from projects on pricing to studies on consumer behaviour”.
Which part of your studies was most useful to you for your job?
“Coding, maths and statistics. But my advice is to explore all subjects, I have always wanted to delve deeper into each one in order to gain more experience. The time spent during the internship is crucial, because for the first time you have to handle yourself proactively and independently, depending on the project you are assigned to”.
What would you recommend to those who want to do your job?
“I often read that there are a few women engineering graduates, I hope this will change soon. To the girls who are still on the fence, I would suggest you embark upon this journey without fear and just plenty of desire to learn. The technical world never stops, which is what makes it so beautiful”.
