In talks with Amitra Sudan Bhunia I Accredian Spotlight

A six years experienced senior infra developer, Amitra Sudan Bhunia witnessed the expansive impact of data science and machine applications in the service industry. Curious and intrigued, in a pursuit to upskill himself in DS and ML, he looked for the best data science course in India. And when he found Accredian, he didn’t look any further and enrolled for the Global Certificate in Data Science (GCD) program at Accredian. 

In this interview, let’s what interests him about data science the most and how his learning experience has been at Accredian.     

Question 1: Which program & batch are you part of at Accredian & tell us more about your current work profile?

Amitra: I am part of the Global Certificate in Data Science (GCD) program, July 2020 batch. Presently, I am working in Cognizant as Senior Infra Developer. 

Question 2: Walk us through your career journey & what got you interested in Data Science & Machine Learning?

Amitra: I have six years of experience in development and implementation via ServiceNow, a very well known IT service management tool. I have started my career at Infosys and currently working as Senior Infra Developer. 

In my career I have seen that data science implementation is increasing on a massive scale. Even in service, implementation of various prediction modules and applications is rampant. So, when I did a market search on data science, I realized that it is a huge thing and now is the best time to move to the data science domain. That’s why I started looking for the best data science course in India, found Accredian and immediately enrolled in its GCD program.      

Question 3: What tools and packages in Data Science & Machine Learning have you mastered in your Data Science & AI program at Accredian so far?

Amitra: I learnt Python and its different libraries like Numpy, Pandas, Matplotlib, and Seaborn. In machine learning, I got to study Scikit-Learn. And because I am working on a project right now, I have some experience in the spaCy library and NLTK platform.  

Question 4: What are some initial challenges when you got started on your Data Science journey, and how did you overcome them?

Amitra: I had two initial challenges in the beginning of my journey. One was statistics; which was a nightmare to me. I studied it whenever I got time so that I could quickly improve myself in it. 

And the other one was time management. As a working professional it was difficult for me to balance work and study. So I dedicatedly scheduled two hours in the morning daily for only studying machine learning and data science.   

Question 5: Who is your favorite faculty at Accredian, and what did you learn from him the Most?

Amitra: Deepesh is my favorite faculty at Accredian. He taught us the EDA process. Instead of taking a sub solution on a data set, he just started from scratch. So that helped me to understand the EDA process better. 

Question 6: What is the goal of Data Science?

Amitra: Data science aims to understand raw data and get some value out of it to solve real-life problems.

Question 7: In your view, how has Data Science evolved in the last few years?

Amitra: In the last five to six years, data science has evolved a lot. It is not just an idea anymore. We use data sets in our daily lives. From AI based refrigerators to TV and washing machines, even the electronic appliances in our homes are equipped with AI applications. 

OTT platforms like Netflix and e-commerce giants like Amazon also have automation, recommendation systems and predictive analytics in place. Right now, data science is also being extensively used in diverse sectors like agriculture, pharmaceutical and healthcare. And because of extensive availability of data, data science jobs have multiplied and options for choosing the perfect data science course in India has increased.  

So it is safe to say that data science applications have not just evolved but are evolving and intercepting our daily lives with each passing day.      

Question 8: What are the current trends in Data Science that you are most excited about?

Amitra: One of the current trends that I am excited about is natural language processing (NLP). I am working on a project where I have to predict associated issues from tickets raised by users. I am also learning about feature extraction, add tokenization, word corpus, etc. And, these things are really cool. Apart from that, I’m also very much curious about deep learning and image processing. 

Question 9: Which are some of the blogs that you follow?

Amitra: I follow several blog topics like NLP, text extraction process from audio and video files, etc. on Towards Data Science and Kaggle. Apart from that, I also follow a few YouTube channels on machine learning and data science. 

Question 10: What is your advice to anyone wanting to start a career in Data Science?

Amitra: I think it is the perfect time for any fresher to start a data science career. And my advice would be to study hard and network with experienced professionals in this field. Think carefully and get your priorities straight before jumping into data science because it is going to take significant time and effort to master it completely. And lastly, make sure that you choose a reliable and detailed data science course in India like at Accredian.

This was a conversation with one of our GCD students – Amitra Sudan Bhunia. 

For more such interesting student interviews, check out Accredian Spotlight.