Samuel McMurray

7.15 AM

I catch the train to work from Parramatta station. It’s a peaceful walk into the office from Central station and I ride up the infamous 3-storey travelator at the ATO’s Latitude East CBD office. Along the way, I spot a coffee shop on my commute that I’ll have to try out soon.

8.00 AM

When I arrive at the office, I locate our meeting rooms for an upcoming networking event for the Graduate Data Network (GDN).  The GDN is a community of graduates across the Australian Public Service (APS) that are looking to develop their data skills through projects and training.

I’m one of the 2022 Co-Chairs for the GDN. The GDN is available to all APS graduates and is a great way to develop skills and experience in areas that may be quite different to your day-to-day data science work. Much of my contribution is made up of helping our working groups in an administrative and strategic capacity, as well as assisting in organising networking, and training events throughout the year. This has helped me to diversify my skillset in areas such as stakeholder engagement, project management and value delivery.

8.10 AM

I arrive at my desk and log on to check the availability and capacity of the meeting room. Unfortunately, it’s not big enough, so I’ll have to chase up some other meeting locations in the Sydney office.

Afterwards, I plan out my daily tasks, check my emails, and collect a badge from the Structured Query Language (SQL) training course I completed yesterday. Since my second rotation is in data engineering, much of the process automation is completed with SQL so this was a vital skill to brush up on before I start to get assigned tasks.

9.00 AM

I open Microsoft Teams and notice my team members have all started work for the day. I message ‘good morning’. Since this is only my first week in the team, I’m waiting for access to systems so that I can use them securely like databases and team files. However, there is always plenty of self-paced training from external providers such as Datacamp and the ATO’s amazing internal training courses on a wide variety of topics including Machine Learning, Power BI, project management, leadership, communication, and the list goes on.

10.00 AM

I set up a few meetings for the GDN working group leads and respond to some other GDN member requests. Since I am only one-week into my current team, my work is still picking up, but I take a bit of time to reminisce about the wealth of experience I gained from my last rotation in Fraud analytics.

Daily, I was optimising both supervised (XGBoost) and unsupervised (Autoencoders) machine learning models and learning how to productionise them into cloud-based data pipelines. I’ve learnt so much since joining the ATO and am grateful to have the opportunity to work with a team that encouraged me to always be learning and trying new things.

12.00 PM

It’s lunchtime! I get my regular lunch to-go at Wong Kee fast food, which is the best-kept secret on Pitt St (shh, don’t tell anyone 😉). I bring my lunch back upstairs and catch up with some fellow graduates from the Taxation stream for lunch. It is so great to share our experiences from our different graduate streams and I always learn something new.

2.00 PM

I attend a meeting with the lead of the Outreach Working Group. We are looking to better define the scope of his project and how the GDN can start to connect with other senior data scientist and new recruits. It really helped to talk out the problems he was facing, and we were able to settle on some clear action items from the meeting.

3.00 PM

I have a meeting with my graduate Career Development Manager (CDM)to check in on how the new rotation is going and to reflect on the past 6-weeks. The past 6-weeks of the Graduate Program is the call-centre experience, that bridges the two rotations. It’s a very immersive experience that allows you to interact with clients and give back to the community. I learnt that each client is unique depending on what they need and who they are.

We also set some future goals, such as continuing to complete my data training and the completion of a graduate machine learning task. The meeting will be followed up with a group meeting with my Rotation Team Leader to make sure I am how I am tracking and progressing. My CDM and Team Leader are really invested in growing my ATO career.   

4.00 PM

I take a 15-minute break in one of the quiet areas on our floor. What a view!

5.00 PM

It’s time for me to update my timesheet and log off for the day. I say goodbye to my team members head off to meet some friends for dinner.

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