With over 10 years of experience in working with various frameworks, CMS and server infrastructure, Prashant Pandey now wanted to learn something that would not only challenge but will complement his already experience in the near future. And one day when he came across one of Accredian’s free Data Science and Machine Learning sessions on Facebook, he knew just what he needed. After a little bit of self-research, he enrolled for the Global Certificate in Data Science (GCD) program at Accredian.
In this interview, lets see what interests him the most about 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?
Prashant: I was initially part of the Global Certificate in Data Science (GCD) program, November, 2019 batch. But after I realized my need for a deeper understanding of data science and machine learning, I upgraded to the Global Certificate in Data Science & AI (GCDAI) program.
Currently, I am working as SE III at Ari Network Services, Inc. The company provides e-commerce and e-catalog platforms, lead management tools and digital marketing services to our clients. I am working on one of its SaaS projects and my responsibility is to maintain the project’s higher availability to clients, optimizing its functionality and making it feature-rich for them.
Question 2: Walk us through your career journey & what got you interested in Data Science & Machine Learning?
Prashant: I have over 10 years of experience. I started my career as a web developer in National Informatics Center in which I worked with PHP technology. Later, I have also worked on multiple frameworks and CMS and handled server infrastructure.
I was also the Assistant Team Lead in SynapseIndia where my core responsibilities were team management and end-to-end project management and delivery. So, overall, the majority of my work is on PHP and SQL technology along with other supportive frameworks.
Before joining Accredian I was looking for some advanced technical courses to upskill myself. I wanted to learn something that would be new and at the same time would complement the experience I already have. And as I have handled the entire software cycle and am really experienced in it, I now wanted to know how I can capture, analyze, and utilize data through software.
So I had two options in front of me: one, was to pursue DevOps and two was to become an AWS Engineer or become more proficient in any other technology dealing with nodes and stuff. But my main goal was to learn a technology that has future implementations.
One day, I found a free data science and machine learning session of Accredian on Facebook. And, from that session I got to know more about data science and machine learning. Later, I also looked it up on the internet and the facts that I found regarding DS and ML really built my confidence that I am on the right path and I should definitely upskill in this.
Machine learning is in fact the future of any software. Because if you look at the evolution of machines, you will see that initially we had to operate machines manually but right now we are designing machines that would not just work on their own but learn automatically. And that happens through the data that they are constantly collecting and processing themselves. And, this aspect of machine learning really struck my mind and I joined Accredian to learn the technologies of data science and machine learning.
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?
Prashant: I was new to statistics but I had a little bit of experience in Python programming. So statistics and the diverse data science and machine learning concepts were completely new to me. However, right now I am quite confident about Jupyter Notebook and the different Python packages of Pandas, NumPy, Scikit-Learn and Matplotlib. And I have worked more on them to get a better understanding of data science and machine learning.
Question 4: What were some of the initial challenges when you got started on your Data Science journey and how did you overcome it?
Prashant: One of the major initial challenges was that I was completely new to this. And the other mammothian challenge was statistics. Coming to this program, I realized how important statistics is in data science. So, I went through the Starter Kits provided by Accredian and that helped a lot to understand the basic concepts.
Question 6: What is the goal of Data Science?
Prashant: As the name suggests, data science is basically the science of data. So, the goal of data science is to find insights from raw data to support decision making in businesses. Right now, the volume of available data has increased drastically which actually provides us with ample opportunities to explore and analyze this data to optimize businesses.
Question 7: In your view, how has Data Science evolved in the last few years?
Prashant: Data science has evolved a lot in the past few years. Data volumes have increased exponentially as more people are using mobile phones and applications. These data available through social media, ads, or even through CMS in different sectors can be used to optimize not just decision making but also processes and profitability.
Question 8: What is your advice to anyone wanting to start a career in Data Science?
Prashant: So my advice to someone who’s just starting in data science is don’t rush into it, take your time. You have to put your effort and time into this to understand the basic concepts. And, it is important that you have a good hold of the basic concepts as they will come handy when you will be doing data analysis, cleaning, model building, etc.
This was a conversation with one of our GCDAI students – Prashant Pandey.
For more interesting student interviews, check out Accredian Spotlight.
