Working as a Manager in the strategy and operations team of KPMG since May 2016, I lead engagements in the Education and social development sector working with multiple Govt. and Pvt clients. Prior to that was a team lead at Cognizant Technology solutions from 2011 to 2014 working as a software developer. Academically I did my MBA Full Time from FMS Delhi from 2014 to 2016 and my B.Tech from the West Bengal University of Technology. Read further to learn more about my journey with Great Learning’s PGP Data Science and Business Analytics Course.
I am full-time management consulting professional with KPMG currently working as a Manager out of the Kolkata location.
The biggest professional challenges were getting back into studies after more than 5 years since my MBA and finding a way to balance the requirements of this course with my office work (which in of itself is significant in volume and nature). But I was determined to find a way to make it work, so the challenge was accepted!
Great Learning was offering a comprehensive course in Data Science and Business Analytics in collaboration with the University of Austin at Texas which is one of the best institutes to offer courses on Data Science (comes in top 5 in QS rankings). Also, the online mode of learning actually worked out for me provided my work commitments and schedule. Having worked in the education space for 5 years now and especially with EdTechs I was well versed with the benefits of an online mode of learning especially for a subject such as Data Science.
The mentored learning sessions are of absolute essence since these are the sessions where the concepts that we learn are reinforced via live discussions, doubt clearing sessions, thorough explanation of concepts. The self-learning is complemented and in fact further accentuated by interactions with an expert/ mentor.
Our mentor (Mr. Deepak) is very knowledgeable and has the amazing ability to explain things in a simplified manner. He would make us understand new concepts via real-life examples and live demos (Example – He explained sentiment analysis by analyzing live tweets from actual Twitter accounts). His mentorship has really been essential for the success of my journey in the program. He would never restrict himself to just the requirements of the course but would always teach us extra and new concepts which were not part of the course material or curriculum
I have been incorporating the concepts and techniques I have learned as part of this course in my professional engagements (sometimes even if that is strictly not the task of the engagement). I have used predictive modeling techniques to predict accidents across districts in West Bengal, forecast enrolment rates for vocational education in West Bengal, formulated dashboards and performed detailed descriptive analytics to present relevant actionable insights to our clients based on available data. I am trying to carve a niche for myself within our education and social impact team in KPMG where the engagements I do would be driven by extensive data analytics concepts.
Have fun with data. Data Science or Analytics is not Python/ R/ Tableau/ Power BI. It is not Regression/ Bagging/ Boosting/ Classification. It is not the algorithms we learn or the tools we know. It Is about knowing exactly what to do with data. As long as your concepts are clear and you have a clear plan/ strategy of what to do with the data at hand and what outcomes/ insights you can derive from the data, everything else will come to you naturally.
