Sy Kien Phan - MSc Data Science

My name is Sy Kien Phan - most people call me Kien. I studied the MSc in Data Science at Queen Mary University of London 2023-24, graduating with a Distinction. For my final project, I worked with Assentian Ltd, a London-based company working on AI solutions for the construction industry.

The opportunity came through the programme's industry partnership pathway. It was a natural fit - Assentian were tackling a genuinely hard computer vision problem, detecting safety compliance on construction sites from CCTV footage, and I had prior experience in vision-based modelling. The chance to work on something with real data and real-world stakes, rather than a cleaned benchmark dataset, was what drew me to it.

Working with real organisational data is a completely different experience from academic datasets. The data is messy, the labelling is inconsistent, and the problem definition shifts as you learn more about the domain. That process of going back and forth with a client - clarifying requirements, justifying modelling choices, explaining trade-offs in plain language - taught me far more about what applied data science actually looks like than any coursework could. It's less about finding the clever solution and more about finding the right one for the context.

The UK data science and AI job market is competitive, and employers here tend to ask very practical questions — what did you actually build, what decisions did you make, what went wrong. Having an industry project means I could answer those questions with a real example rather than a hypothetical. It also gave me early exposure to how UK companies think about AI adoption, which made a real difference when I started talking to employers after graduating.

It's the closest thing to a real job you can do while still being a student. You work on a genuine problem with a genuine client, and by the end you have something you can speak to confidently in any interview room.