Nathan Adams | Data Visualisation & Insights Analyst, Hotels.com in London

November 2017:  I was a final year student at the University of Bath, frantically searching for internship and graduate opportunities for when I entered the “real world”. During my search, I stumbled upon an Expedia recruitment event: The Business Analytics Games. This was the perfect opportunity to visit the Expedia office and network with prospective employers. I reached out to the recruitment team at Expedia and quickly started planning my trip to London. The event was a series of short challenges pertaining to different areas of analytics, such as Business Intelligence, Product Analytics and Pricing Analytics, with hiring managers from Hotels.com, Expedia Partner Solutions and Brand Expedia all present. After some successful networking, I was invited to an interview in the forthcoming weeks and then offered a summer internship in the Hotels.com Business Intelligence team!

June 2018: Fast-forward six months, I had finished my studies and graduated with a first-class degree from the University of Bath and I was about to begin my Summer Internship with Expedia Group. The prospect of living in London for the first time, while working for a tech company I have long admired was rather exciting. Our first day consisted of meeting our intern counterparts in other brands and teams, which was made up of 30 summer interns and industrial placement students. The early talent recruitment team jam-packed the summer with training events, social activities and lunch & learn sessions – damn I miss those free lunches. It was getting towards the end of my internship and I was extremely pleased to hear that there was an open role in my team for a graduate-level analyst. I jumped at the chance and was offered the role of Data Visualisation & Insights Analyst. You could say the internship was a success!

October 2018: After building a good relationship with the early talent recruitment team and knowing that I was at the event in 2017, they reached out to me to help organise the evening. This year we decided to just have one, bigger challenge. I came up with the idea of a hypothetical sporting event which incorporated the end-to-end process of data analysis, allowing the students to engage in rich conversations about how an event can affect the business and how we can use data to leverage these opportunities. The Business Analytics Games 2018 was a huge success, with over 30 students attending from multiple Universities, both inside London and some as far as Leeds and Bath.

So… what a difference a year makes? From attending as a student desperate to get my first job at Expedia, through to helping organise and create the challenge at that very same event one year on is something I could never have imagined.