John Christiansen

"My career has meant that I've been working with data to make better decisions for business and other, more socially useful purposes, in what is now known as data science for almost my whole career, from my late-20s to now my mid-50s. The route to a career in OR that I took was admittedly unusual: I went to university in my mid-20s after a first career that ended. 

As a scientific (generally) and mathematical (specifically) type from a very young age, I'd learned early that I always wanted to find answers and, if I find a partial or inaccurate answer, I have a near psychological obsession with trying to make the answer more accurate: this has meant that a career in OR was almost an inevitability! 

The OR Society is something that I've come to later in my career knowing that I find a great opportunity to meet with others who feel the same way and to participate in the activities of the society. There's a stereotype for mathematical types that we're not especially social, and I am alive to this, but as the image below shows, membership of the Society has helped me.  

I really enjoy the outreach activities that the society is involved in via the Education in OR team and I've manned a stand in Manchester, Birmingham, Oxford and London and I've also done Zoom meetings for careers advice for soon-to-be-graduates."