About Me

The Long Version

Hi there, I’m Nicola. Professionally-speaking, I took a bit of a winding road to get to where I am now. By training, I’m an economist. I studied business administration (and civil law) to receive my Bachelor’s degree, followed it up with a Master’s in Banking & Finance, and ended up with a job as a Research Associate at the Competence Center of Corporate Finance. Throughout school and work, I never really found a niche field that was more fascinating than the rest, which is generally frowned upon in focused academic work. However, the methods of analyzing data and wrangling them into a coherent story always fascinated me. Also, I love breaking complex topics down into simple, easy-to-digest pieces. Thus, taking stock of the pieces of my job that I enjoy the most, we get: data analysis, data visualization, and story-telling.

At the start of setting up this website, I had no idea how these pieces will eventually fit together yet, but beefing up my data skills seemed to be a good place to start. After a few months of expanding my skillset beyond the statistics and simple R-programming I use as a scientist and creating lots of personal projects, I am now ready to share my knowledge via this personal website.

On a more personal note, my physical locations have also been on a bit of a winding path. I grew up and attended all levels of school in Liechtenstein (follow the link if you have never heard of this country before in your life 😉). I moved to Bern, Switzerland for obtaining my degree in business administration and spent half a year in the beautiful city of Oslo, Norway as an exchange student. Currently, I am living again back at home in Liechtenstein. In my free time, I like to play football, read, watch way too much Netflix, and hike.

Next to conducting research, fiddling around with datasets and closely following the financial markets, one of my greatest passions is traveling around the world and exploring different cultures. So far, my wanderlust has brought me to many enchanting countries across Europe. However, my most fascinating adventures were probably in Namibia 🇳🇦, South Africa 🇿🇦, Cambodia 🇰🇭, Thailand 🇹🇭 and Australia 🇦🇺.

On the top of Lion’s Head in Cape Town, South Africa

About the Website

At the beginning, this website was just another cool personal project I wanted to do in R - using the blogdown package and the Hugo framework for websites. During the setup of the website I came up with the idea of actually using it as a way of sharing some insights about topics that matter to me with an interested audience. You can therefore expect blog posts about a diversity of topics, with a focus on data science and statistics in R. The general language of the blog will remain English, as it is more natural to communicate data science and finance topics in their ‘native’ language. However, please don’t mind some blog posts in my native language - German.

Care to chat about anything I mentioned or something I left out? Find me on Twitter @NicolaKollmann or email me. Also, please feel free to contact me for freelance work related to data analytics, visualizations or consulting. Finally, if you enjoy the content or even got some benefit out of it, please consider buying me a coffee ☕️.