TENNYSON WU
Multiclasses Analytics and Creativity
In August 2019 I moved to the Netherlands to study for a Masters in Business Administration at the University of Amsterdam. During the masters program I attended career workshop events and completed a few assessments to determine what my strengths were.
In the past, before the masters program, I spent a lot of time improving the areas where I felt I was weak. ​With much effort I made some significant improvements in those areas. But with hindsight I think I could have become colossally brilliant in the areas I was naturally strong, rather than pretty good across the board. So now I want to test that idea and see how good my strengths can become if I focus on them instead.
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The results of those assessments at university showed my top three strengths were analysis, creativity and leadership.
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To me, these strengths made a lot of sense. Prior to my masters degree I studied Actuarial Science and Statistics for my undergraduate degree and spent three years on risk consulting work at KPMG South Africa, in the Actuarial Services team. So my formal training is pretty heavy on analytics. After I graduated from my masters degree in 2020, I also completed IBM's Data Science Professional Certificate Program and extended my analytical toolkit further.
A self portrait I painted in 2021.
A self portrait I painted in 2019.
(Jokes aside I painted this to use as my new online avatar)
On the creativity side, I liked to draw and write little stories as a child. Not much has changed on that front up to now. I still like to draw, and am still interested in story telling. Though, these hobbies have evolved somewhat since childhood.
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My interest in drawing has grown to include digital painting. Some of the stories I invented as a child have stood the test of time ... and my memory. I would like to tell those stories, the ones I remember, in some sort of visual form.
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These two interests have spawned new ancillary hobbies over time as well. I quite enjoy designing my own website, as you can hopefully see. Also, I have learned how to edit videos with blender. Finally, I have also taken up an interest in social media, mostly in terms of social media marketing.
I suppose that leaves my third strength, leadership. Honestly I don't know how this is my third strength; I don't have any particular desire to lead anyone. I do remember wanting to always be in charge during my early years at primary school though. Luckily I grew out of that bossiness.
At the moment I have nobody to lead but myself. I guess the first step to learning how to lead others well is to learn how to lead myself well. To do this I have another project, where I am building a prototype application to gamify aspects of my life. Currently the prototype is in an Excel workbook and runs partly with Excel and partly with VBA code.
Leadership x Analytics x Creativity : Leading myself with a coding project to make a game out of life.