Answer:
Explanation:
Physicist Reina Reyes had a plan: After completing a postdoctoral position in astrophysics at the University of Chicago, she would apply for a more permanent academic position in the US.
That plan derailed, however, when she experienced, in her words, “a very early midlife crisis.” Rather than prompting her to buy a sporty new car, however, the identity crisis manifested in a move back to the Philippines, and a shift from academia into applied science.
“I wanted to do something that has a more immediate impact to society than astrophysics,” she says. “It is almost a luxury that we can spend time in our lives studying the universe... For me, data science was closer to building solutions that affect the lives of everyday people.”
Reyes is now the head of analytics at the Ayala Corporation, a business conglomerate in the Philippines with interests in industries such as water, power, infrastructure, healthcare and education (to name a few). Her job allows her to use many of the skills she developed as an astrophysicist: problem solving, statistics and modeling, programming techniques, and the ability to work with large datasets. And most importantly, she says, it allows her to touch people’s lives.
