Exchange · 5.4162° N, 100.3327° E
Tropical Data Science School, Penang
In January 2025 I flew to Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang for the Tropical Data Science School, a UTS faculty-led Global Short Program. Thirteen days of data science taught intensively at a partner university, in mixed international teams, in a country I had never been to.
Mornings were statistics and modelling in JMP, R and TensorFlow; afternoons were the group project, building a consumer behaviour analysis into a Tableau dashboard and presenting it to the cohort. The cohort also visited Intel's Penang site. The rest of it was Penang Hill, a Holi celebration on campus, sunset on the causeway, and learning to work with people whose reference points were nothing like mine. It credits into the degree as 6 credit points across two subjects: the visit itself, ungraded, and an assessed component that came back a Distinction.
- Institution
- Universiti Sains Malaysia
- Location
- Penang, Malaysia
- Dates
- 5 – 17 January 2025
- Programme
- FEIT faculty-led Global Short Program
- Credit · visit
- 41017 Global Mobility A (2cp) · ungraded
- Credit · assessed
- 49084 Special Course A (4cp) · D
- Site visit
- Intel, Penang
- Stack
- JMP · R · Tableau · Power BI · TensorFlow
Consumer behaviour analysis
The afternoon project ran the length of the school. Survey data cleaned and modelled in JMP and R, then built into a Tableau dashboard and presented to the cohort at the close, in a team none of us had picked and none of us shared a first language with.
What it carries into security work
The hard skills were the ones I did not have going in: Tableau for visualisation and TensorFlow for modelling, and a full pass at retrieving, tidying and classifying a dataset before predicting anything from it. That work maps onto security more directly than the subject title suggests. Threat detection, log interpretation and anomaly detection are the same problem in different clothes, and being able to put a finding in front of a room as a chart they can read is what decides whether anyone acts on it.
The soft skills came from the conditions rather than the syllabus. A team none of us picked, no shared first language, thirteen days, and a presentation at the end. Explaining a technical result to people who do not share your background is the job in both security and pre-sales, and this was the first time I had to do it under a deadline with strangers.
It was also the first time I had travelled overseas on my own. I went in nervous about it, and it turned into one of the greatest experiences of my life, one I still look back on and genuinely cherish. By the end I had a friend group I would never have found at home: students from very different walks of life, a real range of religions and backgrounds, and the USM student buddies who ran the fortnight alongside us. More than the coursework, that is what stayed with me. It gave me a first-hand sense of how much diversity adds, and why it is such an important part of a society.