In this Accredian Spotlight interview, we feature Pallavi N. Jagtap, who is a Manager for Internal Sales at Pharmalab India Pvt. Ltd. Her drive to learn and explore Data Science has led her to join the Global Certificate in Data Science & AI, at Accredian.
Question 1: Which program & batch are you a part of at Accredian & tell us more about your current work profile?
Pallavi: I am part of the GCDAI 2021 cohort. I currently work as a Manager at Internal Sales in Pharmalab India Pvt. Ltd, Mumbai while supporting a team of seven Regional Managers across Pan India level.
We cater to the business of Sterile products in the Pharmaceutical Industry and supply capital equipment.
Question 2: Walk us through your career journey & what got you interested in Data Science & Machine Learning?
Pallavi: I am a B.E. graduate with total work experience of 15 years in Sales support function. Since Data is everywhere nowadays and I had heard a lot about this field, I thought of pursuing it during the covid lockdown and upgrading my skills.
Question 3: What tools and packages in Data Science & Machine Learning have you mastered at Accredian so far?
Pallavi: After joining Accredian, within a span of 9 months I learnt various packages like NumPy, Pandas, Scikit-Learn that are built on top of SciPy and NumPy, Matplotlib. I am yet to learn TensorFlow & Keras in the next level of AI. All these helped me in the journey of Data analysis and machine learning.
Question 4: What challenges did you face when you started your Data Science journey and how did you overcome them?
Pallavi: One of the initial challenges that I had were, I was not friendly with programming. In addition, after a span of 15 years, I was going to learn something online, which I had never done before.
We were used to classroom teaching, where we had lots of friends along with us and a teacher who is mentoring. Online platform was new to me. Although I had interest in learning Data Science, I had a shortage of time.
Managing professional life along with being a mother of a 14 year old son was a challenge. But online learning was a boon to me, where I could do studies being at home.
Question 5: Who is your favorite faculty at Accredian and what did you learn from them?
Pallavi: I had lots of questions in my mind and was impressed with Nikhil’s online teaching, so I joined Accredian. With great teachers like Suchit Mujumdar and a starter kit provided by AccredianI began my voyage of Data science.
The curriculum and LMS designed by Accredian helped me overcome my fear of online learning. I found Suchit, down to earth and a great mentor.
Question 6: What is the goal of Data Science?
Pallavi: The goal of Data Science is to understand huge data that is getting created on an hourly basis in any domain, study and understand it and lastly draw meaningful insights out of it. It will help to drive future business. Data Science makes use of probability, statistics and calculus to help us understand data. Algorithms and AI helps to automate the process once you understand the data.
Question 7: How has Data Science evolved in the last few years?
Pallavi: The roots of data science are so deep & began with use of statistics to increase the computational power of our computers. It’s an applied science that makes use of statistics to discover many hidden layers in the data. It makes use of probabilistic approach, calculus to study the patterns in data to help organisations to increase their business share. And with the advancement in technology, we have seen the field of Data Science evolve for the better.
Question 8: What current trends in Data Science are you most excited about?
Pallavi: Today we are living in a dynamic environment, where within an hour the world around us undergoes drastic changes. Within seconds millions of data gets generated.
I am mostly excited about how NLP (Natural language processing) is used to do sentiment analysis to understand the users and their requirements.
Soon, AI will be used to reduce workplace disruptions. Computer vision has helped enterprises in high dimensional data analytics to study the trends and inconsistencies in the business processes.
Question 9: Which Data Science blogs do you follow?
Pallavi: The blogs that I follow are Machine Learning Mastery, Medium and Dataquest blogs.
Question 10: What is your advice to a Data Science beginner?
Pallavi: Don’t think, just get down in the flowing water and start sailing.
Hope you enjoyed reading this interview. If you want to read more such interesting student stories, check out Accredian Spotlight.
