The field of Data Science has grown and the number of jobs available in the domain are also increasing. The demand for data scientists has increased and more companies are looking for data science talent. Read further to learn about Jyosmitha’s journey with Great Learning’s PGP Data Science and Business Analytics Course in her own words.
I have 6.7 years of total IT experience (5.7 years when I joined Great Learning) working in TCS Hyderabad. I did my Bachelors in 2014 in CSE stream. I have joined the PGP- DSBA course in January 2020. I started my professional career as ETL Support Engineer in 2014 at TCS. At the end of PGP-DSBA course, in November 2020, I moved to an analytics role within my organization. (Currently I am working in a Data science role for an TCS AI product team in Telecom Domain).
I was earlier working in Mainframe and Teradata Technologies for an American Bank client from TCS. It was a Data-Warehousing project and I worked as Technical Lead and as an ETL support Engineer before joining PGP-DSBA.
I wanted a perfect curriculum, mentorship to guide on the entire road map, and hand-on experience to reach my goal within the right time duration. Though I started self-learning before the course, there were many blockers in between as it was difficult to understand concepts and there was nobody on whom I could rely to correct or a proper plan/ road map for the transition I desired.
My earlier role was a support engineer. The learning curve was steep in the initial years but after some point, work became monotonous. As support Engineer, we deal with terabytes of data and maintain the data warehouse. But what happens with that data next, how it is used to improve business and solve business problems was a thought I always pondered upon. When I started exploring, the analytics that happen at the backend for end customer delight intrigued me. Hence I chose to move into this field.
It was difficult in the initial days as I became a student again. But, within 4-5 weeks I got used to the curriculum schedule. The schedule always kept me on feet and every week was productive throughout the journey. After 6 months of the course, I became active on LinkedIN, started networking, posted learnings in short articles frequently and made good connections with people in similar fields. In due process, I came across a Product manager on LinkedIN who also happens to work at TCS. I gave an interview of 2 rounds for the team and managed to clear it and moved into it.
The weekly Quizzes and mentor sessions were quite helpful. The hackathon conducted in the middle of the course helped me to learn how to solve a problem from end to end. The interview questions shared in excelerate were also useful to quickly refresh and revise the concepts. Also, the mock-interview and the presentation during capstone project helped me on how to articulate the concept while explaining to an interviewer.
The curriculum was well designed from the basics. I had no background knowledge of R or python. I was able to learn the language from the very basics from the content. The mentor support is outstanding and it is the best that I could get. She (Netali) was always reachable for doubts clarification and taught all the concepts with simple examples by laying a strong foundation.
After a while in my professional career, my learning curve started to get steep again. It gives me satisfaction when I implement those learnings that I learnt during my course. After a bit of struggle and a continuous marathon of assignments, sessions and quizzes , it feels good when all efforts get paid off. Transitioning is the initial step, I feel there is a long way to go. For now, getting hands-on in real time and understanding the business domain is the main objective.
Finishing off and understanding the content released in the portal before the mentoring session is must. That helped me in understanding the concepts easily and getting my doubts clarified in the weekend sessions. Along with it, extensive reading of articles in blogs and staying active on LinkedIn, participating in hackathons and solving at least 1-2 Kaggle problems along with Great Learning projects is advised.
There will be times when you want to give up, when you will not understand the concepts, when you find it hard to maintain a balance of work-study or couldn’t find time to study and many other challenges.
This is normal and it is okay to slow down a bit, but never stop learning. Persistence and hard work is the key for success.
For more such success stories, watch this space.
