How data science and innovation led to a new career path

Just a few weeks after graduating from UTS, Master of Data Science and Innovation (MDSI) student Amy Yang landed a machine learning job at travel and lifestyle company Luxury Escapes. It was a milestone moment: having walked away from an accounting career three years ago, Amy had no idea what the future held. 

Originally from China, she had completed a Master of Accounting at another Australian university. She’d always liked numbers but had never felt a strong pull towards a particular career — and after six years in accounting, she realised she wasn’t passionate about what she was doing.

“In our culture, there’s a specific, well-defined path that parents hope their kids will follow to live a supposedly successful life,” she says. “But it turns out that sometimes that path doesn’t make you happy.” 

She decided to take the leap back into postgraduate study and started looking for a course in which she could apply her love for numbers in innovative ways. The MDSI, an acclaimed degree from the UTS Transdisciplinary School, immediately caught her eye. 

This flagship degree combines technical skills in data science, analytics and machine learning while developing students’ creative thinking and collaborative capabilities. But it’s the transdisciplinary nature of the course where students from all walks of life come together to tackle ambiguous problems across a range of professional contexts that sets it apart from other degrees of its kind.

For Amy, the diversity of the MDSI’s potential career paths was immediately of interest, but it was the practical component that really grabbed her attention. Course content is characterised by extensive hands-on learning opportunities, including real-world briefs and industry-partnered projects, internships and competitions in which students can bring their skills to life. 

“In my previous degree, we really focused on theory, but I felt like the program in the TD School was more practical — you can take what you learn and use it at work, and I thought that would be more beneficial for me,” Amy says. 

Delivering usable solutions for industry 

Her hunch was right: from early in her studies, Amy found herself building practical skills in data visualisation, coding, statistical thinking and machine learning and applying them to challenges posed by the degree’s industry partners. 

In a subject called Innovation Lab (iLab), she helped develop a machine learning prototype for WhistleOut, an online comparison site that matches customers with mobile phone, internet or pay TV plans. The prototype helped WhistleOut identify the features of different plans that were most likely to influence purchasing decisions.

“For example, is it the download speed? Is it the price? Is it the campaign activities? What are the important drivers or features that actually impact the market share of a specific plan and help the buyer to decide?” she says of the project, which won the iLab Best Project Award for 2023. 

“That was a very practical experience, because we actually worked with the business partner, and it really felt similar to being in a real workplace.” 

The practical opportunities didn’t start and finish in the classroom. Amy also completed an internship with SafeWork NSW, the government’s workplace health and safety regulator, as part of her UTS degree. The placement focused on extracting and modelling data from what was then called Twitter (now X) to understand more about online sentiments related to mental health in the workplace. 

“The government agency wants to know what the current or emerging trends are to help them make policy and service delivery decisions and to avoid risks in occupational environments,” Amy says. 

A second internship followed, this time with the tech company Atlassian, which Amy pursued as an extracurricular activity. Here, she worked in Atlassian’s product analytics team on a project to analyse the behaviours of customers using the Jira software management system. 

An award-winning student experience 

That the MDSI has equipped Amy with industry standard skills is clear, but the combination of those skills with a growing sense of belief in her abilities has been the real powerhouse behind her progress. 

“It was definitely the coding, the confidence to code, the machine learning basics and the confidence to know that you can learn new stuff quickly,” she says. 

Those abilities were further bolstered by a suite of industry competitions and events that are core to the UTS experience. At the 2024 UTS Tech Festival, an annual event that connects students with technical degrees with industry opportunities, Amy collaborated with two other peers on an ergonomic AI app that detects and corrects people’s posture when they’re sitting at a computer. The project won the Microsoft Industry Choice Award.

She also came third in the Brain Computer Interface Drone Race Challenge, a competition in which students leveraged the power of human brainwaves to control a real-life drone. 

Other learning opportunities presented themselves in a range of campus activities. Amy signed up as a UTS Student Ambassador and started attending U:PASS, a peer-learning program in which students who have already completed challenging subjects provide guidance and support for their peers. 

In her second year of study, she became a U:PASS leader herself.

“I’m a bit of an introvert, so when I led those sessions, it challenged me to do something that doesn’t really come naturally to me,” she says. 

“It has definitely built my confidence. It made me comfortable with being uncomfortable. Now, at work, I can speak up more.” 

From the classroom to the luxury travel sector 

Having graduated towards the end of 2024, Amy is now settling into her role as an associate machine learning analyst at Luxury Escapes. Here, as part of the Recommendations team, she applies her analytical and machine learning expertise to customer experience initiatives. 

Among them is a new dashboard that tracks customer engagement; as well as helping to develop the dashboard, Amy is now analysing the customer behaviour data in a series of experiment tests. She says finding the job was a combination of her previous accounting work, the skillset she developed at UTS, her internship experiences and her extracurricular skills. 

“In the interview, I talked about the projects I did at uni, including the industry engagement work and extracurricular activities. I think it helped to show that I’m really keen, interested in the techniques and that I want to learn more,” she says. 

It’s the same drive to learn more that propelled Amy out of her accounting life and into the unknown of the MDSI.

“Ten years ago, I didn’t see that I would ever change my career,” she says. “Now, I’m on a totally different path.”

See here for more information about our new Executive Master in Data Science and Innovation.