Jamie Vergara

Five months have passed by since I decided to leave the finance world to pursue a whole other world— data analytics.

It has been one of the most exhausting and rewarding endeavors. I fully believe the work I’m doing and the people I’ve met and continue to meet are playing a huge part in my formative years. I never thought I’d try anything outside of finance, let alone— I never thought I could be coached to do the work I’m doing today.

As much as I miss my teammates from EY, the benefits from DnB and my life now is something I wouldn’t trade. There’s not enough money that could ever be offered for me to return back to 60 hour weeks, tears, and non-existent vacations. Including my cell number for out of office automatic emails was painful but an expectation.

The growing pains of career searching will always be there. There’s been tears and frustration here too of trying to be a decent data analyst. But hey, there’s been many “I can’t believe I was able to do it” moments. As a data acquisition analyst, my team and I research for datasets across the ESG board. We contact data vendors who may have data we’re interested in, we host calls and communicate with company contacts in other countries to see what data they have; and communication has been an art itself for me to learn. I’ve been getting creative to find certain datasets when certain ESG topics are a lot harder to identify than others. I walk away from calls saying to myself “You did that. You showed these guys how to identify data points. You asked the data vendor what they have and explained the ESG vision well.” And something I’m still working on, presenting datasets internally to teams here. It may shock some of you how nervous I get, but presenting my research and findings is probably the most intimidating task. My teammate said I’ve grown so much and I’m getting better at presenting. My boss said my emails are getting so much better. And I can’t help but let out a sigh of relief, that while the learning may be hard, I feel at home here at DnB.

I think one of the biggest heart aches and let downs was having to accept the fact that I wasn’t going to be an expert or the best right off the bat; and learning that this is OKAY. A lot of my skills from working at a big 4 didn’t transfer over to this role. I’m learning so many new approaches for different scenarios. My boss told me the goal was to hire a candidate like me: fresh out of school, some experience, someone with potential, to essentially form and mold and one day have me lead others. You can’t really do that with an experienced candidate.

This summer season was a whole lot of highs and lows. Which is going to be common in any season of life. I’ve grown close to many other colleagues in other departments, and I grew close with the interns that were working in the office for 10+ weeks. As much as it hurt to watch my team’s intern and another intern I was super close with have to go back to school, we all know the phone works on both ends. And most of the full time folks and I are excited to network with one another and also get to focus on our project work. We live in a very interesting time and an unpopular opinion I’m going to throw out here is that I’ve been enjoying physically working in office. While work from home still holds many benefits, the energy and community in an office is something calls at home can’t satisfy. I have the chance to work along side other departments and introduce myself to higher ups including c-suite individuals. It’s been a bliss and has helped me grow more. It’s also helped me learn how to look decent in business clothes. Switching from athletic wear to a dress was an adjustment.

As always, thank you to my best friends, Nat, Julia, Cici and Mary for the pep talks and the push for me to not give up. Thanks Caleb for always being an ear and a phone call away. Shout out to Lydia and Delanie for the career advice. The bad news is, time flies. But the good news is, we’re the pilots. And I’m excited to share again in the next few months what being a data analyst means to me and how it’s going.

PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL DISCLAIMER:  The views and commentary on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent my current or previous employers.