Being an assistant professor at GCET, Tanu Solanki never lost her love for learning. To upskill as well as feed her curiosity about data science and machine learning, she looked for data science course in Noida and enrolled for the Global Certificate in Data Science & AI (GCDAI) program at Accredian.
In this interview, let’s see how she plans to use her newly acquired data science skills at work and how her experience has been at Accredian.
Question 1: Which program & batch are you part of at Accredian & tell us more about your current work profile?
Tanu: I am part of the Global Certificate in Data Science & AI (GCDAI) program at Accredian. Currently I am working as a professor in a reputed engineering college. I am involved with teaching and training the BTech students.
Question 2: Walk us through your career journey & what got you interested in Data Science & Machine Learning?
Tanu: I am a BTech and MTech degree holder from Banasthali Vidyapith. When I started my PhD, I got more curious about data science and machine learning. During that time I was also upskilling myself with various new machine learning algorithms.
I have applied many of those machine learning algorithms in my PhD and some were giving amazing insightful results. The machine learning algorithms learnt at Accredian’s data science course in Noida helped me enhance my thesis.
I have been also teaching them to my BTech students during Python classes. This can help them advance their career as it has also helped me enhance mine.
Question 3: What all tools and packages in Data Science & Machine Learning have you mastered in your Data Science & AI program at Accredian so far?
Tanu: During my data science course in Noida, there are many tools and technologies that I have come across. I learnt about Python and Statistics, and later moved on to exploratory data analysis which helped me understand the data cleaning process.
I have also learned several Python libraries like NumPy, Pandas, Psychic, Matplotlib, and Seaborn. And Tableau is the one I loved the most as you only have to drag and drop to get output.
I have also learned several machine learning algorithms like linear regression, logistic regression, decision tree, random forest, PCA, SVM, KNN, Naive Bayes and API. Every algorithm has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Some are used for small data sets, some for larger data sets, but we can use them to derive results effectively.
Question 4: What were some of the initial challenges when you got started on your Data Science journey and how did you overcome it?
Tanu: The initial challenges in my data science course in Noida lay in understanding maths and statistics. To understand statistics and implement it in the format of a programming language was tough.
However, I overcame this by studying various blogs on Medium, KDnuggets, AnalyticsVidhya, etc. I read and revised repeatedly to become more familiar with them and I kept on moving forward in my learning journey. Gradually I became more confident.
Question 5: Who is your favorite faculty at Accredian and what did you learn from him the Most?
Tanu: Although all the faculties at Accredian are amazing, my personal favorite is Lavi Nigam. He recently taught us ML Advanced. And the reason why I like him is that he doesn’t just explain the concepts but provides a huge amount of material so that we can practice by ourselves. And, with regular practice, I became much more confident in applying data analysis.
Question 6: What is the goal of Data Science?
Tanu: The goal of data science is to construct the means for extracting business focused insights from data. This requires an understanding of how value and information flows in a business and the ability to use that understanding to identify business opportunities.
Question 8: What are the current trends in Data Science that you are most excited about?
Tanu: I am very much curious about natural language processing (NLP). While working with NLP in my PhD, I came to know about the offerings that it brings to the table and especially how we can use it in data science to extract information from audio and/or video files. For example, right now I am answering this question in audio but with NLP it can be processed into written mode as well. And, I think that is beautiful.
Question 9: Which are some of the blogs that you follow?
Tanu: I follow Google News, KDnuggets, Data Science Central, and Medium.
Question 10: What is your advice to anyone wanting to start a career in Data Science?
Tanu: My advice to anyone who wants to build a career in data science is, firstly, be patient and never lose hope. Keep learning. Enjoy the journey. You will keep on learning new things everyday so enjoy it and learn it. Don’t pressurize yourself or blame yourself that you don’t know anything.
This was a conversation with one of our GCDAI students – Tanu Solanki.
For more such interesting student interviews, check out Accredian Spotlight.
