From Education to Head of Airbnb Data Science
Head of Data Science at Airbnb
About this episode
We spoke to Elena Grewal when she was Airbnb’s head of data science, where she discovered the key to making successful career jumps: “Often it’s more about words being different than about skills being different”. Elena founded and runs Data 2 the People, a community of data scientists working on projects for the public good.
Highlights
Career paths don’t always follow a straight line. Just ask Elena Grewal, whose education culminated in a PhD in education, but who became the head data scientist at Airbnb.
In some ways, the leap wasn’t quite as daunting as it might sound. Grewal’s training at Stanford was interdisciplinary, including statistics and econometrics. “Often it’s more about words being different than about skills being different,” Grewal said in an interview recorded for Stanford’s Women in Data Science podcast.
At one point, she began to study machine learning and initially thought it was very different from the work she was doing. “Then I started looking at what people do in machine learning, and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s logistic regression, it’s clustering analysis. I do that; we just call it something different,’” Grewal says. Whether it’s called data science or not, many different fields have some kind of quantitative component, and people in those fields who are using quantitative skills may well have the background to become a data scientist, she says.
Employees who are not data scientists can learn to understand and use the data their companies collect. Grewal started “data university” at Airbnb, a program that teaches employees at all levels to work with data to do just that. “I don’t want people who have data to be the keepers of knowledge or power, but to share that and to enable every person to be able to think more critically and to be able to make conclusions themselves,” she says. Grewal’s team taught SQL – a standard language used to query databases – to employees and created a database they could use to access company data. Since Airbnb launched data university last year, hundreds of people from other companies have asked Grewal’s team to help them start similar programs.
Although undoubtedly successful today, Grewal champions the importance of grit and believing in yourself as a student, as she herself struggled academically when she was younger. In middle school, a “teacher sat down with my parents and told us that I was a really nice kid and that I was going to be fine in life, but I was just never going to be a top student,” she says. She didn’t let it bother her. After working intensively on math with her father, a university professor, Grewal’s grades shot up and she graduated at the top of her class. “I think that was an important early experience: Where you are is not where you can be. It’s important to just work hard, do your best, and see where you can go and not feel limited,” Grewal says.
About the Host
Margot Gerritsen
Stanford Professor [Emerita] Margot Gerritsen is the Executive Director and co-founder of Women in Data Science Worldwide (WiDS) and born and raised in the Netherlands. Margot received her MSc in Applied Mathematics from Delft University of Technology before moving to the US in search of sunnier and hillier places. In. 1996 she completed her PhD in Scientific Computing & Computational Mathematics at Stanford University and moved further West to New Zealand where she spent 5 years at the University of Auckland as a lecturer in Engineering Science. In 2001, she returned to Stanford as faculty member in Energy Resources Engineering. Margot was the Director of the Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering (ICME) at Stanford from 2010-2018 and the Senior Associate Dean for Educational Affairs in Stanford’s School of Earth Sciences from 2015-2020. In 2022, Margot took Emerita status to devote herself to WiDS full time. Margot is a Fellow of the Society of Industrial & Applied Mathematics, and received honorary doctorates from Uppsala University, Sweden, and the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. She now lives in Oregon with her husband Paul.
Connect with Margot Gerritsen on Twitter (@margootjeg) and LinkedIn.
Find out more about Margot on her Stanford Profile.