At INSAID, we create accomplished and empowered Data Leaders. We groom our students to dominate the world of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and reshape their future. We value what our students bring to the table. We share their vision and support them during their journey and ensure that they carve a niche for themselves.
We’re proud to have tutored exceptional students all across India. Today, one such exceptional student, Raja Srinivasan stands in the spotlight.
Student Name: Raja Srinivasan
Batch: CDF October 2018
Total years of experience: 22 years
Area of expertise: Business Management
Malvika: Hi Raja, can you walk me through your professional journey so far?
Raja: I am a Strategic Account Manager at Sify Technologies Ltd. I have 22 years of experience in the field of telecom and information technology. We deliver in the infrastructure services sector; we provide the infrastructure required for any enterprise, like data center, data cloud and so on.
Malvika: What got you interested in Data Science and Machine Learning?
Raja: My interest in Data Science and machine learning developed from my curiosity towards the latest buzz around something. I have a natural inclination towards learning new concepts and technologies, at least when it comes to our own IT space. Even our customers for that matter, are talking about RPA and machine learning applications. People talk at the ground level of what they want to do from an application standpoint. I thought that I would be able to appreciate it better after understanding these concepts.
Malvika: Are there any current trends in the Data Science space that you’re looking out for?
Raja: Data is available in tons and tons. There is no dearth of data with the corporates. It is a source of intelligence. For example, let’s say you have a retail outlet near my house. There are plenty of people coming and doing business. This data generated is captured by the retail store owners and they can take decisions like how they can upsell. They have means of tracking a person inside the store also, that way they could know what the purchases are and put a pattern to that behavior. The trend which excites me is what to do with data and how you can infuse data into your business. Some business decision can only be taken through Data Science where they interpret, analyze, and figure out patterns.
Malvika: Can you talk about the evolution of Data Science?
Raja: Data Science understanding has improved over a period of time. Earlier whenever people talked about data, they were immediately referring to big data, Hadoop clusters and things like that. All the noise aside, from a technological standpoint, big data is something like big elephants, which has to be handled in a different way. So data was handled more from the CIO or CTO perspective, now that authority has been handed over to the business. The business is the one who drives the data. Now, they are the ultimate beneficiaries who have gone through the clear interpretation and analysis of the data.
You might have a better system to analyze big data, and you might have a Hadoop cluster, and so on and so forth but what happens, if it doesn’t help me to take a business decision? Even banks do a lot of business intelligence analytics and that has improved decision making over a period of time. Thanks to the tools, like a Power BI from Microsoft, or maybe even Google Analytics, even AWS has analytics built-in. So analytics has become a part and parcel of any cloud for that matter. Cloud is the driving force for data as well. It is very dangerous to predict the growth of data because you will never know if your data will come in terabytes or petabytes or even more.
Malvika: Crafting a great Data Science resume is a critical part of getting shortlisted for
Data Science roles. Tell us some ways in which you have improved your resume
as part of Data Science Career Launchpad.
Raja: Those sessions added a lot of structure to the typical resume building exercise. I always thought that the length of a good resume for someone with my experience would be about 6 pages but I learned from the session that recruiters don’t have more than 6-7 seconds to devote to a resume and anything more than 2.5-3 pages is likely to get tossed aside.
Malvika: INSAID’s mission is to groom data leaders of tomorrow. What do you understand by a Data Leader? How do you think a data leader is different from a data scientist?
Raja: Data Scientists are concerned with solving the smaller, more technical problems on the horizon. Data leaders make sure those translate into a good business decisions. This means that data leader should be something similar to a data CxO-level decision-maker.
Malvika: How do you think your objectives are being met at INSAID?
Raja: Before I started my course at INSAID, I was completely blank. I didn’t have much expectation; just some basic knowledge and a few case studies. Those were my very basic expectations, because I had not done any classroom studies since a long time. But then the reality was much beyond expectations; there were a lot of cases discussed after the class, and then we had some people who volunteered. There were discussions with the instructor and we had a good amount of interaction with the students as well. We were able to articulate our ideas after the class, we were allowed to speak with respect to some case studies or discuss them with others and that added value to the class.
Malvika: Do you have any advice for a newbie who will be starting out in this space?
Raja: The first thing would be to develop your own interest in the field. No one has chosen this for you and you yourselves need to dedicate time and understand what you want from the course. Especially for data science. Since it’s a combination of programming, statistics and interpretation of data, it is not that easy to have a thought process around everything actually. It does require a good amount of study.
Malvika: Thank you for your time, Raja. All the best!
Raja: Thank you Malvika!
