My passion for numbers

It certainly wasn’t boring for Pascal Godejohann while he was taking his master’s in “Applied Data Science & Analytics” over a period of two years. “It was a great deal of work,” recounted the 32-year-old, who only saw his girlfriend at the weekends. However, he doesn’t regret all the effort for a minute. The relationship has been steadfast through thick and thin – and he also reaped the reward for his hard work. Last year in the autumn, the prestigious Technological University Dublin granted him the award “Student of the Year” as the first master’s graduate to achieve this distinction. In his master’s dissertation, he developed an algorithm which allows filtering out the most relevant datasets from a relatively small number of datasets which in turn have a large number of attributes. One possible application is that it facilitates improved predictions in the area of health analysis for patients.

Pascal Godejohann got to where he is now by a rather circuitous route. After he left school, he completed an apprenticeship as a media designer for digital and print media and later on he took a degree in business psychology. In his spare time, he took an internship as a recruiter for SAP specialists and IT project managers. This led him to the topic of his bachelor’s dissertation, which dealt with the prediction of probabilities for placing job applicants. He then became totally absorbed in this area. Pascal Godejohann succeeded in obtaining one of the few coveted places on the “Statistical Sciences” master’s course at the University of Bielefeld. And he undertook further specialisation with the move to the “Data Science” master’s degree at TU Dublin. “I did some intensive studying on machine learning in Bielefeld and found that I was more interested in this type of modelling and development in that area than I was in classical statistics.”

He has now been contributing his passion for figures and algorithms to HDI for the past three years: “I’m really keen on the responsibility and independence that I have here,” said Pascal Godejohann. He finds that his job only becomes really exciting when he is working with large numbers of datasets, and given this fascination, an insurer like HDI is a particularly attractive workplace. He noticed this at a very early stage. While he was studying for his master’s, he was working with an application at HDI where he was using historical data successfully to predict future customer behaviour. At the moment, he and his team are developing an algorithm that can use an app to assess motor damage with the help of artificial intelligence.