Helle Kogsbøll Leerberg is a Specialist in Analytical Engineering at the company Intellishore. She graduated with a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Her master’s specialized in Computational Physics.
Please give a description of the work you do in your current position.
I currently work in consultancy at a company named Intellishore. We help clients to get better insights from their data by most often utilizing cloud platforms. My colleagues include Data Engineers, Infrastructure Engineers, Data Analysts and Data Scientists. But Intellishore also has a strong team of strategic consultants, who are a big part of many of the projects that we do.
As a consultancy, we take on many different types of projects, and the projects that I most often participate in are Data Platform projects. Here my personal work is centered around Data Engineering, where I help clients onboard their data to a Data Lakehouse or Data Warehouse and transform that data such that it can for example easily be used by my Data Analyst colleagues to create dashboards and reports that can be used by the client for value creation. This means knowing and utilizing a lot of the existing resources made available by the cloud providers, but also a lot of programming in Python/PySpark or SQL.
While Data Engineering is one of my core competencies, I also have experience with setting up the cloud infrastructure needed to enable working with data and working as a “technical” project manager, where I define and manage the technical tasks that need completion for a project to finish.
What motivated you to study physics or engineering in the first place?
My main motivation to study physics came from a great interest in working with math and logic, but also for keeping that work grounded and in relation to the actual world. On top of that, I grew up in a household with two engineering parents, which I suspect has had an impact on my general interest in popular science.
I also greatly considered studying engineering in the first place and also later for my Master’s, so what might be more interesting is my motivation to continue to study physics back then. As part of my bachelor’s, I had really dived into the programming options, which I found was really that perfect combination of math and logic for me, and the reason why I chose Computational Physics as my Master’s specialization.
Physics provides such a fun space for practicing your skills in programming, statistics, machine learning, and problem-solving. While you can definitely also study something similar in an engineering degree, the Computational Physics specialization allowed me to pursue this interest in programming while having two more years of daily interactions with my friends and fellow students and mentorships of my existing professors.
What made you decide to pursue a career in the private industry?
I have always thought that I would have a career in the private industry rather than academia and throughout my bachelors this became even more clear to me, as I identified programming to be a great joy and interest of mine.
What separates the private and academic industry for me, is the timespan of projects. In my experience, depending on what area you work with, academic projects can span many years as both the experimental and theoretical parts of discovering new science take time. By contrast in consultancy, I experience that over a few months or even weeks, we can identify and implement solutions for clients, whereafter they are able to utilize these solutions to bring growth and knowledge to their company. This short distance between idea and result is something I really enjoy.
Additionally, I also really like working with a concrete product, where physics subjects can sometimes become abstract as we venture out into space or inwards into atoms.
How do you use the skills you learned as a physicist or engineer in your work?
To me studying Physics is studying data (I was an experimentalist), from day 1 we took measurements, gathered those measurements in files, analyzed those measurements using programming, and visualized the results for reports. As projects became larger – first-year projects (specific to NBI), projects outside of courses, bachelor thesis, and master thesis – the need for organizing your code well, setting up main scripts to run your code in the right order, etc. also became larger. All of these are very concrete skills that I use every day at work.
Studying physics has taught me statistics and math for making calculations of any kind, logical thinking for programming and thinking as a computer, problem solving for any complex issue I might run into, time management for solving tasks on a deadline, writing to describe a complex solution that the reader might not know beforehand, making presentations for sharing my knowledge with clients and colleagues and in general it has given more confidence in myself; if I can complete a course in a complex subject like Quantum Physics, there are very few problems in the everyday world that I cannot take on.
What does being a physicist mean to you?
This is a difficult question because I view a Physicist as being someone who researches and expands our knowledge of the world through working with the laws that govern space, time, energy and matter. In that context, I often say that I am a “bad” Physicist, as I have not exercised my knowledge of those laws in many years, and can in many cases not necessarily answer physics questions on the spot.
However, being a Physicist is to me also a community. I have never met another Physicist, where there was not an immediate connection. This might be due to having been “schooled” in a similar worldview, where the scientific method is a core way of working, or simply that we can relate to each other’s experiences of spending many years studying how the world works.
Being a Physicist is something I am very proud of, but it is also not the main describer of who I am and the knowledge that I have at the moment. Therefore, I would today introduce myself as a Data Engineer in a professional setting, but Physics has definitely shaped the way I think and solve problems.
What advice would you give to young people (in particular women and minorities) with a background in physics who would like to pursue a career in the private industry?
In regards to the private industry, I have the most experience in the world of data. If you dream of becoming a Data Engineer, Data Analyst, or Data Scientist, you definitely have a great foundation for handling, visualizing, and exploring data with a background in Physics. In your first job, you will likely learn a lot about applying this foundational knowledge in a company. The company often has a tool that you need to familiarize yourself with, multiple environments to work in, guidelines for ways of working, and many other elements that make their flows run every day.
My experience is that many data departments work actively with Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) and that having a diverse group of employees (across many spectrums) is seen as a great advantage for the team.
My best advice is simply to go for it, write a lot of applications, investigate the concepts in the job postings that you do not know, and ask questions about the job and the team. The best way to find out if this is a way for you is to try it out, most companies have a very short distance between the Data Engineer, Analyst, and Scientist roles, so there will often be options for tuning into your exact profile over time, or to an even more general/managing role in the company.
If you are still a student, I would highly recommend getting a student job, to get more hands-on experience and find out where your interests lie. This does not mean that you have to know the exact field in the private sector where you see yourself working in the future, something similar will still be beneficial. I have lots of colleagues who started as a student assistant and therefore already had an advantage in their field when they got their degree.
If you are soon starting your last year of studying, I would also encourage you to look up graduate positions within the private field you would like to work in. These types of positions are intended for newly graduated individuals to experience lots of different sides of one company throughout their first 1 or 2 years of employment. I myself missed this opportunity, as I was not aware that you have to apply for most graduate positions in January/February if you would like to start in August/September.
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