Making data-driven decisions to help achieve net zero: Maria’s story
Maria believes that by making data-driven decisions that can help bp maximise the energy produced while minimising operating costs, this can help steer us towards a better tomorrow
Maria has always had a passion for maths and chemistry. Despite doing her undergraduate and master’s degrees in chemical engineering, she didn’t see herself becoming an engineer like many of her peers. She realised her interests lay in data science, which led her to join bp in September 2019 on the digital graduate scheme.
She first joined us as a software platform engineer, completing her first rotation there before joining the data science team for her second rotation.
One of the main reasons she joined bp was the structure of the graduate scheme. Not wanting to be thrown in the deep end, she wanted a role with responsibility, but with the right support network and training opportunities to facilitate this. She says the bp graduate scheme is perfect for this: “It’s been designed by people with significant experience in the field,” she notes. “It has been tailored to provide us grads with a variety of learning opportunities, while giving us the ability to network with the right people at the right time.”
Learning in a collaborative environment
Maria considers herself a people person, so one of the things she loves about bp and her current team is the great sense of community and teamwork:
Day-to-day, Maria works primarily on projects that involve coding, analysing data, and testing, as well as interacting with the business to better understand their needs and timeline. Her current project involves creating a predictive programme that can anticipate what might happen several days ahead, so that systems don’t have to be taken offline. “By optimising the systems, we save money and with that money we can invest in low and no carbon sources of energy,” she says.
Thinking ahead to a low carbon future
As well as the collaborative culture, another reason Maria wanted to join bp was that she saw us as a forward-thinking company with an early focus on technology, having been one of the first energy companies to move our data into the cloud. However, what ultimately drew Maria to apply was bp’s approach to the future: “I personally have a lot of concerns around climate change,” she says.
Maria believes that having access to affordable energy should be a basic human right. She says that by making data-driven decisions that can help bp maximise the energy produced while minimising operating costs, this can help steer us towards a better tomorrow: