With 9 years of experience in the IT industry, Shrikant Kolte has tried his hands in multiple domains. Aspiring to upskill and grow his career in data science and machine learning he looked for the right data science and machine learning course. And when he found Accredian, he didn’t look any further and enrolled for the Global Certificate in Data Science (GCD) program at c.
In this interview, let’s see what interests him about data science the most and how his learning experience has been at Accredian.
Question 1: Which program & batch are you part of at Accredian & tell us more about your current work profile?
Shrikant: I am part of the Global Certificate in Data Science (GCD) program, May 2020 batch. Currently, I am working as a Quality Assurance Coordinator at Expleo Group.
I have seven years of experience in Software testing and 2+ years of software development experience using vb.net.
I have experience working in ERP, Insurance, Telecom, and Utility domains. I am currently working as a QA Coordinator in the utility project.
As I have experience in multiple domains, I am looking forward to using my expertise as a data scientist and machine learning engineer to grow my career in this field.
Question 2: Walk us through your career journey & what got you interested in Data Science & Machine Learning?
Shrikant: I have a total of 9+ years of experience in the IT industry. After completing my MSc (Computer Science) degree, I started my IT career in 2011 as a software developer.
I worked as a software developer using VB.Net as a SQL server at the backend for more than two years. I have seven years of experience in Quality Assurance with multiple domains like Utilities, Insurance, Telecom, and ERP.
I am currently going through the GCD (Global Certification in Data Science) course from Accredian, which includes intermediate level ML in its data science and machine learning course. Till now, I have worked on two projects in my class. The first one is for exploratory data analysis(EDA), and the second one is the ML model for Avocado’s price prediction.
Question 3: What tools and packages in Data Science & Machine Learning have you mastered in your Data Science & AI program at Accredian so far?
Shrikant: In my data science and machine learning course in Accredian I learned the Jupyter tool and basic packages like NumPy, Pandas, Seaborn, and Matplotlib.
Question 4: What are some initial challenges when you got started on your Data Science journey, and how did you overcome them?
Shrikant: I have seven years of experience in software testing, and most of the part is manual, so it’s more towards the non-technical part. So the challenge is to learn technical things like Python coding, statistics (in which I was not good in college), and maths.
As I had excellent ERP, Telecom, Insurance, and Utility experience, domain knowledge was not a big challenge for me. So I started working more on the coding part, and parallelly I watched many videos on Youtube for data science and ML.
In Accredian’s data science and machine learning course, I have gone through all the basics of data science, Python, and maths. The course they have prepared is very significant and helpful for me to clear all the basics and get more information and knowledge in my journey.
Question 5: Who is your favorite faculty at Accredian, and what did you learn from him the Most?
Shrikant: Accredian has a tremendous and experienced faculty. All are very good at teaching but if I have to choose then I like the teaching style of Suchit and Deepesh.
Suchit explains all the concepts very well with live industry examples, which helps students understand the concepts very well.
Deepesh’s teaching style is unique as he explained all the concepts using pen and paper only. The way he explains all concepts is very significant.
Question 6: What is the goal of Data Science?
Shrikant: Data science’s primary goal is to extract more insights/information from the available data. If you have good domain knowledge, you can understand the data in more detail.
Question 7: In your view, how has Data Science evolved in the last few years?
Shrikant: In the past couple of years, Data Science has grown to include businesses and organizations worldwide. It is now being used by governments, geneticists, engineers, and even astronomers.
As new technologies are growing, the data produced by these technologies are increasing. This generated data should be analyzed and understood by each industry to grow their businesses. This is done using data science by data scientists.
Data Science and Big Data, which started with statistics and statistical models are deeply embedded within the field of data science. They have, for the past five to six years, evolved to include concepts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).
Question 8: What are the current trends in Data Science that you are most excited about?
Shrikant: I am more excited about two trends in Data Science: Cloud-based Data Science and Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Cloud computing is a strong trend in the field of data science. It offers the ability for any data scientist from anywhere to access virtually limitless processing power and storage capacity. Computing power on demand is beautiful to data scientists who want the resources when they need them.
There is an increasing number of cloud options that data scientists can choose from, like Amazon SageMaker, Google BigQuery ML, Google Dataproc, Microsoft Azure ML, IBM Cloud, NVIDIA GPU Cloud, etc.
I am not much aware of the NLP. Still, NLP provides a strong value proposition by offering business users a more straightforward way to ask questions about data and to receive an explanation of the insights.
Question 9: Which are some of the blogs that you follow?
Shrikant: During and even after the data science and machine learning course, I follow blogs like KDnuggets, Data Science Central, Towards Data Science, and Analytics Vidhya to grab more knowledge of data science and machine learning. I am also following a couple of YouTubers who explain data science and ML.
Question 10: What is your advice to anyone wanting to start a career in Data Science?
Shrikant: My advice to anyone who would like to go for a data science career would be to choose the right role as there are a lot of varied roles in the data science industry and the right data science and machine learning course. You can be a data visualization expert, a machine learning expert, a data scientist, a data engineer, etc.
Secondly, take up a data science online course, select any tool/tools to master and have some basic database knowledge like SQL. Work on your communication skills. Network with professionals on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.
This was a conversation with one of our GCD students – Shrikant Kolte.
If you want to read more such student interviews, go to Accredian Spotlight.
