KALI PANDEY
Current Organization: Wipro, Bangalore
Work experience: 3 years
GCD August 2018 Student
Goal: To become a Data Leader.
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In our recent Accredian spotlight edition, we caught up in a real-time conversation with one of our students.
In the following discussion, our academic head Vikas Mehta is in conversation with Kali Pandey who is currently in our GCD Programme and has completed the first term.
Vikas: Hi Kali, let’s get started with your professional journey first.
Kali: Well, I am a BCA graduate and completed my graduation in 2015.
Later, I joined Wipro as a trainee.
Though I started working early, I always wanted to learn more and study further.
Fortunately, Wipro gives an opportunity wherein we can work as well as study through BITS Pilani’s Work Integrated Learning Program(WILP).
Having completed 3 years in Wipro, where I worked mostly on the technical parts like SSI, an ETL tool, I started exploring options where that work can be more exciting than it is.
That’s when I’ve come across, Data Science, AI, etc & all the buzz around it.
Vikas: So, when did you actually come across Data Science, Machine Learning & AI & what have you planned to do with it?
Kali: I’ve always aspired to work in a product company.
When I checked Machine Learning applications, I realized that these are currently being implemented by product companies and the scope in IT/ITES is very minuscule.
Since early 2017, I’ve started digging more information about this field and figured out that internally in Wipro also we have a department dedicated to Machine Learning and AI.
It was a sigh of relief!
I immediately reached out to the managers in that departments seeking opportunities as we have an option to switch projects, that’s when challenges started.
As I expressed my interest and after a couple of discussions with various managers, I couldn’t get through as I had no hands-on experience or project understanding.
So I just googled around and have done a couple of online courses through platforms like Udemy, edX and watched couple videos on Youtube.
Though they gave me a very good idea about this field, I felt that there’s a lot more that can be done.
That’s when I came across Accredian.
Vikas: Well, that brings me to Why Accredian?
Kali: Many factors have helped me decide to pursue Global Certification in Data Science program with Accredian.
Key points that helped me decide were,
- The initial webinars ( Machine Learning Live Training, 2-day series ) gave a lot of clarity and helped me connect all the dots.
- Sample class taken by Suchit Majumdar, Chief Data Scientist at Accredian, the interaction levels were spellbinding.
Vikas: That’s quite generous, having completed more than a month with Term 1 of GCD program, how are things now?
Kali: Things seem exactly like I wanted!
Suchit does coding part live in the sessions & we get to do in parallel, which gives us more hands-on exposure.
The team is very prompt in replying to our queries and the community makes it easier to post queries or interact with our cohort.
Also, we have the post-class discussion wherein we get to speak and share our thoughts.
Vikas: As you’re coming from computer science background, how difficult or easy it is to learn?
Kali: I’ll still consider that programming is new for me because when I was in my graduation I was good at SQL and never at programming.
So, back then I learnt C programming language a bit but after that, I was completely detached.
But the python starter kit which was provided before the program has started helped me a lot.
I went through it rigorously and to be frank earlier I was even confused why are we using “for loops” but all these concepts were made very clear with python so in this one month I can say that I am clear with the concepts of python.
Vikas: Glad that it helped!
Thank you so much Kali for sharing your insights & journey so far with us.
We’ll continue this discussion once you’ve worked on a couple of Machine Learning projects.
