In this Accredian Spotlight interview, we feature Nagraj Deshmukh, a leading Software Engineer at Societe Generale Global Solution Centre. His insatiable passion for knowledge and upskilling led him to enroll in the Global Certification in Data Science & Artificial Intelligence program at Accredian.
Question 1: Which program & batch are you a part of at Accredian & tell us more about your current work profile?
Nagraj: I’m from GCDAI, May 2021 cohort. I have been working as a Full Stack Software Engineer at Societe Generale Global Solution Centre since August 2020. My work involves taking care of the production for a credit risk-related application.
Question 2: Walk us through your career journey & what got you interested in Data Science & Machine Learning?
Nagraj: My Career has been 1.2 years long and I have been interested in Machine learning since the beginning. I’ve worked on a Facial emotion recognition project in Robotics and Machine Analytics lab, in which we developed a new optimization Algorithm. I’ve always wanted to pursue the path of Data science, and more specifically Machine learning.
Question 3: What tools and packages in Data Science & Machine Learning have you mastered at Accredian so far?
Nagraj: I have mastered the Jupyter Notebook, Google Collab tools, Numpy, Seaborn, Pandas, and Sci-kit Learn libraries.
Question 4: What challenges did you face when you started your Data Science journey and how did you overcome it?
Nagraj: The main challenge for me has been time management. It is purely due to job commitments. After long working hours at the job, it becomes quite difficult to take 30-40 minutes out for Data science. So I try to work hard on the weekends.
Question 5: Who is your favorite faculty at Accredian and what did you learn from them?
Nagraj: The entire faculty is brilliant but my favorite is Neelmani. He gives real examples of how a project is completed and he tries to help students with small confusions and doubts.
Question 6: How has Data Science evolved in the last few years?
Nagraj: Like every new technology, I think Data Science projects were started in small labs and universities, and with an increase in computing power as well as the amount of Data (Big Data), its applications became popular.
From only classifying the emails as spam, now we have projects like GPT-3 that can create images on its own, and projects like AlphaGo which can beat the best players at the most complex board games. And with groundbreaking projects like these, more and more people are inspired to think of Data Science as a career option.
Question 7: What current trends in Data Science are you most excited about?
Nagraj: I am most excited about GANs (Generative adversarial networks), NLP (Natural language processing), and Algorithmic trading.
Question 8: Which Data Science blogs do you follow?
Nagraj: I follow Google cloud, Analytics Vidhya, Data Camp community, and Towards Data science
Hope you enjoyed reading this interview. If you want to read more such interesting student stories, check out Accredian Spotlight.
