Since childhood, I have been interested in pursuing my career in a medical setting. Following that dream, I have started my Bachelor’s in Health Sciences, where I got to explore various career options in the healthcare domain. During this journey of exploration, I was fascinated by the technology aspect in medical imaging specifically. So, after graduation, I took a break and started understanding how Data Science can help get me closer to the technological development role in healthcare or any domain for that matter.
Before the PG Program in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, I did an online course in Data Science and worked as a full-time Data Science intern at an AI Hub of a consulting services company for a few months. That is where I got exposure to the vast platform of applications that AI offers in various domains. But I could not gain a lot of technical experience from this internship, and I have learned from this opportunity that I still needed to develop my technical skills to work on a complete Data Science project from end-to-end. This is one of the reasons I have planned on enrolling in the PG Program in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning offered by Great Learning.
Coming from a completely non-technical healthcare domain, my biggest challenge was coding and using programming languages. Even after taking an online Data Science course before this PG Program in AIML, my technical skills were not at the mark of being able to use them implemented at the workplace. No matter how well I was able to comprehend the Machine Learning concepts, I was lacking behind in the coding skill, which is an essential ability to become a successful Data Scientist.
While doing the internship, I realized the need for me to get trained in coding, and it was important for me to transition into Data Science with an officially graded certificate. Just any completion certificate did not have great importance since I am coming from a healthcare career background. Great Learning’s PG Program in AI and ML offered these features, and more importantly, the curriculum was friendly for someone with a non-technical career background like mine. Career assistance at the end of the program is another feature that grabbed my attention and made me more interested in pursuing this program. I have never had any apprehensions about an online learning medium.
Mentored sessions were my go-to to resolve any questions from the entire week’s content. These sessions summarized the week’s content, followed by which one or more case studies were discussed. Even though the week’s content included hands-on exercises for each topic discussed, a case study during the mentoring session brought all those components together with a gist of an application that resembles a real-time problem statement. These sessions were also mainly useful for me because of how approachable my mentor was, and his responsive and helpful nature has made my journey at Great Learning efficient in an easy manner.
Each one of the mentored learning sessions was excellently conducted and managed. But to be very honest, the quality of mentored learning sessions depended not just on the mentor but also on us students. The days we came into the mentoring sessions prepared (after watching the recorded weekly content) and participated more in the sessions were more efficient. I felt that on those days, I had more questions to ask and interacted more with the group.
My mentor played a very important role in my success story at Great Learning. As I have mentioned previously, he was friendly, approachable, and responsive. I could easily reach out to him for any ambiguity I had in my mind regarding my quizzes or projects after they were graded. I also could reach out to him with any kind of course-related question and additional topics that were not covered in the weekly content. He has also provided me with some helpful suggestions regarding how to approach my future career options.
I have learned the importance of data to develop any given sector. In terms of specific skills, I have improved my coding knowledge and learned a lot of new tools used to analyze data, visualize it, bring it to a form that can be used, and also build efficient models that can help us bring any firm or organization.
I would recommend Great Learning’s PGP in AI and ML to anyone interested in pursuing a career in AI and ML. This is a great place to start learning and also a good platform for career transition. My suggestion to someone starting this program would be to spend allotted time on the weekly content and if possible additional material to expand your knowledge. Participation in hackathons is also a good way to boost your confidence. In addition to all this, be persistent and keep yourself open to learning new things along the journey with Great Learning. Finally, it was a wonderful ride with the Great Learning team and faculty!!
