Date: August 23, 2024
Blog #3
From May 2024 to August 2024, I worked as an Assistant Health and Safety Analyst in the Safety & Security Department at the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC). I can still remember that at a very young age I was always fascinated by automotive vehicles, especially trains and subways and there was nothing more I wanted than to be a subway/train operator when I grew up so the company always had a place in my heart. This internship not only allowed me to reminisce my childhood dreams, but also gave me my first experience in data.
In the future, I see myself working in software or data and given that I had a more software based role in my previous internship (AI Software Developer at SequoiaDB Ltd.), I felt this opportunity would allow me to see what a career in data would have to offer and gain some experience to widen my skills. Below is a brief overview of my role and accomplishments.
My responsibilities kept me busy on a daily basis, but it was the good type of busy. I created pivot tables to automate data categorization and visualization generations and was also responsible for managing and tracking construction safety data that comes in. In some of my larger projects, I sometimes had to communicate with other people in my department to gather proper or more detailed information about the subject. Given that construction at the TTC is a very fast paced environment, there was always a lot of tracking to do on a daily basis. Being accurate was always stressed to me to be a necessity.
My biggest accomplishment in this role was creating a project using pivot tables, visualizations and tracked data to analyze patterns trends in over 4000 construction submittals. I pointed out helpful information such as key contractors and construction offices with high rejection rates, long turn-around times and more in my presentation to the entire department. Overall, everyone was very pleased with my work.
In conclusion, I am happy with the way my second internship turned out. I learned lots of skills, especially how to use Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, SharePoint and PowerPoint that were not covered in any of my university coursework and produced high-quality work on a daily basis. Given that my first internship was purely virtual, I am glad that I was able to land a hybrid role this time as it allowed me to make personal connections with my co-workers in the office and even in outdoor social events that I unfortunately was unable to do in Summer 2023.
From this experience, I have seen that I am capable of thriving in a data related role and will continue keeping this path open in the future to further develop my data related skills. Perhaps, I can pair my newfound data management and analytical skills with programming skills in a data science or data engineering role for next summer, though I am always also open to working in purely software development as well. I am also happy about how fast I adjusted to this new role. The whole construction safety processes and procedures I needed to learn in order to do my job properly was quite complex, especially since this was the first time I was exposed to this type of field. But nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed my time at TTC and I am excited to see where Summer 2025 takes me next!