Through the career stories of ANNT's friends and members, we want to offer insight into the wide range of possible career paths and broaden the vision of STEM professions. The next story comes from the United Kingdom, from ANNT friend Kerim Suruliz.
“I currently work as CTO (Chief Technology Officer) at Abtrace Ltd, a start-up specialising in artificial intelligence applications in medicine. My job involves many different kinds of responsibilities, from programming and reading scientific papers in the field of artificial intelligence to researching cloud computing technologies. What I particularly like about the job is the variety of day-to-day activities and the need to constantly learn new things. For this kind of position, a multidisciplinary approach matters more than a narrow focus on a single field.
The skills that matter for my position are mostly technical in nature (largely related to programming, data analysis and machine learning), but management and communication skills are also necessary. For example, I work every day with medical doctors to whom non-trivial technical concepts need to be explained in an intuitive way. In the future, I expect the use of computers and similar technologies in medicine to increase. I believe this will lead to better health outcomes for patients and make the work of doctors and other medical staff easier, mainly through the automation of repetitive tasks.
As for the use of artificial intelligence in medicine, the future will depend on solving the problems of protecting medical data and ensuring patient privacy. The great progress in the field of artificial intelligence over the last decade is partly due to the growing amount of publicly available data on the internet, but of course things are not so simple in medicine, so the field is still at a relatively early stage of development.
I attended the Second Gymnasium in Sarajevo (in the first and second years) and a school in England (in the third and fourth years). After finishing secondary school, I studied mathematics with computer science at Cambridge University, but gradually shifted my focus to theoretical physics, the field in which I later earned my doctorate. My approach was generally to study whatever I found interesting at the time. That is probably not the best idea if the main goal is building a career!
What I particularly liked about my studies was the breadth of the range of courses that could be taken – from pure mathematics, through quantum mechanics and fluid dynamics, to applications of statistics in finance. What I don't like (in retrospect) is the fact that study programmes follow the current "fashions" in the field to some extent. For example, the physics of how a rainbow forms in the sky, as far as I know, is rarely studied in detail in physics courses, because it is a problem that was "solved" back in the 19th century and is now not considered all that interesting.
Since I completed the final years of secondary school in England, I was already "in the system", so when applying to university I more or less followed the standard procedures for British secondary school students. The selection process relied mainly on an hour-long interview based on about ten problems, which I also had about an hour to work on. I remember that at the interview they mostly asked me about the problems I had not even attempted, that is, topics I was not particularly fond of. The idea was probably to see how students think under pressure. I think the Second Gymnasium, and the support that maths competitors in BiH generally had in my time, prepared me for all the kinds of tests and interviews I went through when applying to university in England. I received a scholarship for international students that covered all study costs and on which one could live comfortably
I believe it is always good to send applications to as many places as possible; the universities with the most scholarships for international students are, as a rule, the most prestigious and the highest-ranked, which by definition means that it is not easy to get a place. You should not be discouraged by unsuccessful applications to such places – chance factors play an important role, especially in interviews.
The application process should be started as early as possible. In England, preparations usually begin as early as the third year. Students at elite private schools often receive training at school in preparing their application (especially the "personal statement" part), as well as for the interview, which gives them an advantage over other students. Still, in my opinion, that kind of preparation cannot make up for the depth of knowledge of a student who has gone through our domestic and/or international competitions in mathematics, physics or computer science.
Of course, before deciding which university to choose, it is important to think about personal factors in good time. American universities probably have the most scholarship funding (and also the least discrimination among international students; many scholarships at European universities are reserved only for students from the EU), but America is far from BiH, and there might not be many opportunities to return home during your studies (or later, since people as a rule find jobs in the country where they studied).”
