Career Development Strategies E004 From PhD in Mathematics to Freelancing as a Data Scientist. Is It Worth To Do a PhD?
Dr. Leonardo Morelli works as Scientific Software Developer at Alten Nederland in Rotterdam since February 2020. Leonardo completed a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Applied Mathematics at La Sapienza University, Rome (IT). Then, he moved to Leiden, the Netherlands for his PhD program in Mathematics. Although he insists that his PhD research in Mathematics concerns how the “Hola!” waves at football stadiums propagate, his research employed highly technical mathematical tools both on the theoretical and on the computational side. Halfway through his PhD program, he decided to switch his career path to the industry world — yet still, it took him another couple of years to find a topic that he would be passionate about. In this webinar, Leonardo told us how he got his first job outside academia, made his first steps in the consultancy world, how to recognize a good employer, how does the scrum technique work, and how he feels like – as an Italian in the Netherlands.