Oisín Mulhall
I had many great experiences in Maynooth, be it making new friends, opening myself up to new ideas, learning about a different way of living. For me, the one thing that I will take away from my time in Maynooth is the fantastic people that I met. Everyone I encountered during my studies was interesting and friendly, and always willing to take a new member into their group. My course in particular was full of truly exceptional people. There were only twelve of us to begin with (and that number unfortunately got smaller over the years), but we were an extremely tight knit group, with all of us still in contact.
I was always involved in the Maynooth GAA Club, in particular the hurling teams. Some notable highlights of my time with them was reaching the Freshers Hurling Final in my first year, and then being part of the Senior team that won the Ryan Cup in 2014.
For me, I think that the atmosphere and environment about in Maynooth made it really stand out for me. You never got the feeling like you were just another face in the crowd, there was always an air of familiarity about the people you would be seeing around the campus on a day to day basis. For me personally, the lectures were never too big, I felt like there was a good degree of interaction with the lecturers which made the lectures themselves far more enjoyable.
A lot of what I learned in the lectures has come in handy very often. I am in a fairly technical role, and having the solid technical base that I developed during my time in Maynooth has helped me immensely. Outside of academics, I would say I developed my interpersonal skills by simply talking to new people, be it lecturers, colleagues, friends etc. Also, a lot of time management skills from trying to juggle so many assignments at one time!
Maynooth is a great environment to you to grow and learn in. If I had to give anyone any advice about studying in Maynooth, it would be to just throw yourself into as many new experiences as possible. You learn so many new things, pick up new skills and meet loads of great people.
I came into Accenture straight out of college. I was actually amazed that I got the job as I had absolutely no prior work experience to speak of. I started with Accenture in July 2015, and moved straight onto the Google account. I started on the gTech Partners Team as the Continuous Improvement and Innovations Lead. In this role, I firmed up their reporting structure (building out dashboards, writing data queries), introduced more data analysis into the team and ran a number of automation projects. After a year working in this role, I moved into a more analytics heavy role in another area of Google. In this role, I am building out new analytics and forecasting systems that are used by the team to dictate how they alter their marketing spend.
I don't have any one particular highlight to date as of yet. I have been really happy in both my roles thus far, and have had a lot of fun in them and done a lot of really good work. If I had to pick out something that I was particularly proud of would be seeing one of the projects that I had started off and worked on for months being rolled out to all gTech Partners teams globally. It was a really interesting project and I spent a lot of time on it, and to see my work being used by different teams all over the world was really encouraging.
My current role involves a lot of data analysis. This might be doing deep dives into performance metrics, forecasting volumes and investigation relationships between marketing spend and numerous key performance indicators that the team have. This analysis can be done across a number of different platforms, including Google Sheets, R, Javascript, Python and Google Dashboard Environments. It also involves a lot of research into different techniques/ tools/ packages that might help me in my day to day role.
What I really like about my current role is that you are always doing something different and having to learn a new skill. The business needs are constantly changing, and the analysis required and therefore the techniques required have to change with them.
I learned about Accenture through the course talks and events that Accenture ran on campus throughout my final year. They gave me the opportunity to learn about the company and what they do, as well as engage with employees and former Maynooth students and hear about their experiences with the company.
I would say put yourself out there and learn as much as you can about the company or sector you are looking to get into. For me personally, I learned as much as I could about Accenture and went to all of their events, and that really made a difference when it cam to interviews as it showed that I was interested in the company. I would also say to everyone to keep an open mind when entering the job market. Whether you know exactly what you want to do, or whether you are completely clueless, don't disregard any career just because it isn't quite what you planned initially. I know myself when I started college, I didn't know exactly what I would like to do, consultancy definitely didn't cross my mind, and now I am in a job where I am with great people, doing really interesting work that I am really good at, so I guess it worked out pretty well for me!