15 years into his career, Amarnath Chakka has always dealt with data and technical applications and was curious about data science. Wanting to know more and apply the various data science concepts in his current work, he looked for the right data science course training Hyderabad and enrolled for the Global Certificate in Data Science & AI (GCDAI) program at Accredian.
In this interview, let’s see his take on the future of data science and how his experience has been at Accredian.
Question 1: Which program & batch are you part of at Accredian & tell us more about your current work profile?
Amarnath: I am part of the Global Certificate in Data Science & AI (GCDAI) program, February 2020 batch. I am the Technical Manager at Verizon Data Services and hold 15 years of work experience. I am a certified PMI, PMP, and agile accredited practitioner.
My work usually involves requirement analysis, effort estimations, process improvement, driving the change, strategy planning, and team management. I currently manage a team of 12 automation engineers. I am responsible for system integration testing and end-to end quality assurance of the applications. I also handle web automation and API testing along with project management.
Even though I am in a managerial position, I am a learner at heart. I like to play with data a lot, and am eager to switch my career to data science and that’s why I opted for Accredian’s online data science course training Hyderabad.
Question 2: Walk us through your career journey & what got you interested in Data Science & Machine Learning?
Amarnath: I joined Verizon as a fresher. In these 15 years, I had various roles in the company starting from software engineer to a manager. I had built world-class functional testing and quality engineering stacks, and delivered complex, large-scale, and low latency distributed systems.
I’m interested in Maths and Science and love applying Science in solving business problems. My daily activities include a lot of data-driven decision making, forecasting or estimating the capacity, data-based performance calibration with proper analysis of work metrics.
While performing these interesting activities, I got curious about data science. It’s fascinating to find insights from data that will help improve customer experience. This pushed me to go for a formal data science course training in Hyderabad.
Question 3: What tools and packages in Data Science & Machine Learning have you mastered in your Data Science & AI program at Accredian so far?
Amarnath: Among the available Python packages and libraries in Accredian’s data science course training Hyderabad, I am more confident in NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib and Seaborn. Tableau visualization tool helped me create storyboards.
I also did a few GitHub projects at Accredian, on practicing notebooks that helped understand Python basics. I also practiced a couple of projects in EDA with feature engineering concepts, PCA in dimensionality reduction, decision trees, and Support Vector classification.
Question 4: What were some of the initial challenges when you got started on your Data Science journey, and how did you overcome them?
Amarnath: My major challenge was finding proper guidelines to study. Accredian helped me a lot in not just planning my study time but also in recommending books, blogs, YouTube channels from which I could gain the required knowledge.
The interactive live sessions with industry-experts motivated me a lot. The Data Store series helped to understand the company expectations for a given job role in data science. That way, I also got to know how much I was ready for a particular position.
Question 5: Who is your favorite faculty at Accredian, and what did you learn from him the Most?
Amarnath: The online data science course training Hyderabad at Accredian, is conducted by several phenomenal faculties. Suchit and Lavi are my favorite faculty at Accredian. Suchit was the first teacher in my data science journey at Accredian. It’s a crucial stage where a faculty needs to balance students’ motivation and cover all topics. This delicate balance kept me going smoothly.
Coming to Lavie, his teaching style is different from others. Soon after finishing a concept, he spent more time explaining or clarifying the questions. This helped a lot to know about others’ views or thoughts as well. He also went an extra mile in answering individual questions in emails or forums. He advised us about various useful blogs and topics and that helped a lot.
Question 6: What is the goal of Data Science?
Amarnath: All technologies are developed as solutions to various problems. With 15 years of domain knowledge, my goal of being in data science is to find useful insights that meet the customer’s needs and goals. Currently, we do a lot of root cause analysis or Fishbone analysis of the production issues. Through Accredian’s data science course training Hyderabad I will soon apply my data science skills to quickly classify the issues and transfer to the necessary application team to reduce further handoffs.
Question 7: In your view, how has Data Science evolved in the last few years?
Amarnath: Data Science applications have extensively increased in the current times. A portion of the data science-related tasks could turn out to be automated robotized selection. In the coming years, I also feel that there will be more spotlight on peril and dispersed code.
Throughout the 2000s, various academic journals began to recognize data as an emerging discipline. Instead of competing on traditional factors, companies are beginning to employ statistical and quantitative analysis and predictive modeling as primary competition elements fit faster processing speeds than ever before.
Technology took a giant leap into the new decade, placing a trial for individuals ready and willing to conquer the mountain of big data that had only begun to emerge.
Question 8: Which are some of the blogs that you follow?
Amarnath: I visit a few blogs to keep myself updated which include Medium, Kaggle, GitHub, AnalyticsVidhya, Towards Data Science, KDnuggets, YouTube subscriptions, Stat Quest, and Casey Casaco recordings.
Question 9: What is your advice to anyone wanting to start a career in Data Science?
Amarnath: Choose data science as a career only if you are interested in it and not just because it is a trending and rising industry right now. Rather than following your impulses, introspect on your capabilities and interests and make a decision.
Choose the right data science course training Hyderabad or in any other city or institute as there are multiple options available in the market. Also, data science requires a lot of practice and commitment so make sure to have some time daily for studying.
This was a conversation with one of our GCDAI students – Amarnath Chakka.
For more such interesting student interviews, go to Accredian Spotlight.
