GORS Career Stories - Vlad

I did a BSc in Security and Crime Science at UCL. This degree was a mixture of criminology, social research and mixed methods research, psychology and coding (statistics, machine learning, and with some optional modules I took web development and simulation too). There was also a work placement for 6 months where I worked part-time as a Research Intern at the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime in their Evaluation unit.

I didn’t actually hear about GORS until I’d joined the Civil Service. But after hearing about Operational Research, that’s when it clicked that indirectly a lot of my degree had touched on OR principles, especially in evaluating crime prevention measures.

A large part of my degree was focused on measuring outcomes after intervention, so I was already in the headspace of wanting to work on projects that lead to transformational real-world impacts. I am also analytically minded, and I liked coding during university so wanted to see how I could do it in practice in the real world. Retrospectively, OR was the perfect fit for me!

Separately I also had a mentor in MOJ which I met during university via a charity. He worked as a Project Manager so not GORS specifically, but he was instrumental in helping me understand what working in the civil service and MOJ was like.

I am currently an Associate Data Science Product Manager. I essentially look after product vision, ethics, managing stakeholders, identifying risks, and documentation for Data Science projects in Probation Data Science. Currently, I am focused on projects that use Large Language Models. It helps to have a technical background to understand caveats of models and how to communicate technical bits to non-technical audiences.