Meet the team: Jord🚀
Meet Jord
Lifelong data enthusiast turned data professional. Jord started his career as academic historian, leading to graduate degrees from the universities of Antwerp, Ghent, Leiden, Paris and Oxford, and seven years of (post)doctoral research at the University of Antwerp (PhD in Economic History in 2010). During the second stage of his professional journey, he headed the Research Affairs Office at the same university for about six years (2015-21). While briefly returning to academic research in 2021-3, Jord discovered the joy of data science in R and Python. In late 2023 he started as data consultant at Micropole Belux before joining Plainsight three months ago. Jord is an avid padel player (see below) but most of all, a proud father of two teenage daughters.
We asked Jord some thoughtful questions.
Jord, how did you discover your passion for data?
Truth be told, I have been a data nerd for as long as I can remember. A vivid memory is when, as a 10-year old, I wrote down all the results of my favorite tennis player Jim Courier from my grandfather’s newspaper (our newspaper didn’t show all results). Later, at home I entered and analyzed these results in a predecessor of an Excel spreadsheet – we are talking the early 1990s here!
On a professional level, as an academic historian I always had a knack for quantitative research, constructing large (for historians) databases in MS Access, transferring data back and forth to MS Excel and SPSS to allow for the best statistical analysis. The same was true as a policy maker, where I always tried to support policy decisions by sound data, often quite creatively collected and analyzed. In fact the drive to have better documented ETL processes (even though I had no idea they were called like this at the time), led me to take basic programming classes in R and Python in 2022. This sparked a newfound passion for machine learning and AI, which eventually brought me to Plainsight.
Why did you specifically choose Plainsight?
Funnily enough, we have padel to thank for this, or perhaps more accurately, the shared padel passion that Esli, Lou and I have: I noticed Esli’s padel dashboard on LinkedIn and commented that it was looking really impressive. This led Sander to contact me, and the rest is history 😊
In fact, what truly drew me in were the great talks I had with Lou, Sander and David during the interviewing process. We connected on a personal level, and I was intrigued by Plainsight’s track record of many successful short- to mid-term projects across a wide range of industries – this was exactly what I was looking for. The enthusiastic start-up vibe was the cherry on top!
What was your first month at Plainsight like?
I really enjoyed the Plainsight Academy I had the chance to participate in from my first day onwards. Not only was this an excellent opportunity to get to know both the other fresh faces and the senior crew at Plainsight, the Academy taught me valuable skills I could immediately apply for my first assignment (thanks for the hands-on introduction to Azure Data Factory, Bo!).
During my first month at Plainsight I could already start working for a client (in many ways my first real job that wasn’t government funded) and I liked and like it a lot. The expectations and pace were challenging, but I am proud to say I delivered a high-quality, fully functioning automated solution that saved the client quite some money, all within my first few weeks. Awesome!
If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and why?
When I was 11, my parents and I visited the World Exposition in Sevilla. The country that made the biggest impression on me, was Mexico: on its rooftop it sported massive maquettes of the great Aztec and Maya edifices. Visiting the remains of those monuments is definitely on my bucket list!
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