Do you want a winning formula to win a PYTHON CHALLENGE?
What are the skills required to succeed in one?
Then you need to hear what Sayan Chatterjee – GCD, February 2020 cohort.
who is an ITA at Tata Consultancy Services and also Accredian’s First Python Challenge 1st Runner UP– who beat over 1500 participants for this title, has to say about all this and more…
THE BASICS
Q: What is your background prior to entering this challenge?
I have been in the software industry for more than 5 years now so from the very beginning I have been dealing with Data and I started my journey as a developer and concentrated my journey on becoming an ETL developer. I’m from the BFSI industry which primarily deals with banking and finance.
Q: What made you decide to enter this competition?
After receiving the email from Accredian, I realized that this is a great opportunity to try, practice, and test versatile data science, python concepts and to personally test my existing skill sets.
Q: Do you have any domain knowledge that helped you succeed in this competition?
This competition required a good level of understanding of Python and since I come from a technical background, the basic knowledge at least helped me to break down the tricky problems into fewer complex scenarios.
THE VISION
Q: What inspired you to join Accredian?
Dealing with Data these days, sooner or later you will get exposed to Python, its popularity and the power it possesses. With the number of libraries that exists these days with numerous data sources, one can do so many types of consolidations and data wrangling. There are many people like me who are from a technical background but are now concentrating more on the Analytics part, specifically Analytics with Python. This where Accredian came in for me. Accredian provided us with a structured way to understand new and old concepts without intimidating us into what lies ahead in the Data Science journey.
How has the road to Data Science been so far?
It’s been interesting and exciting so far and I feel that in order to fulfill Accredian‘s vision to build Data Leaders for a better, brighter tomorrow, it’s essential to grow individually. No matter your background, your domain or industry, everyone possesses that knowledge and experience that they can co-relate with the Data knowledge that you acquire. That is where any individual can make a difference. Since, I come from a banking background, I’m looking for a transition into a leadership role, some years down the line.
LET’S GET TECHNICAL
Q. Which tools did you use to help you with the challenge questions?
General libraries like Python and Numpty helped me crack the questions.
Q. How did you approach the questions and structure your solution?
Since there were multiple-choice questions, the answers looked quite similar to each other. One really had to apply their mind to the questions, especially the tricky ones to get the correct answers. Also, they needed to be timed properly as there was a time constraint.
How did you spend your time preparing for this competition?
I saw this as an opportunity to brush up on my concepts and went through the Python and Statistics starter kits provided by Accredian and went through the content provided by Accredian in their LMS. Watching related videos from Youtube, wgschool, websites like Real Python, etc. I focussed on practicing my Python concepts and trying things hands-on.
WORDS OF WISDOM
Q. Do you have any advice for your peers in the upcoming challenges?
Attempt every quiz with confidence. Always try to break the data science problem into smaller chunks and try to solve it in an iterative process. Practice as much as you can before facing a challenge or a competition. The most important data science skills are applied and practical data science skills. Last but not the least, have patience, the solutions will come to you if dealt with them patiently.
JUST FOR FUN
Q. Who is your favourite faculty at Accredian?
I would like to thanks Suchit, Manav and all the other mentors for giving us that extra bit of push to achieve our dreams.
Sayan Chatterjee has been in the software industry for more than 5 years now so from the very beginning I have been dealing with Data and I started my journey as a developer and concentrated my journey on becoming an ETL developer. I’m from the BFSI industry which primarily deals with banking and finance. He is the Python Challenge- 1st Runner-Up and his areas of interest include an end to end data science and analytics-based architectures, language processing, deep learning, statistical machine learning, visual storytelling, and model explainability and to become an exceptional Data Leader.
