“The course is finely curated, keeping in mind that people from any field can take it and learn”, says Shweta Thakur, an alumnus of Great Learning’s PGP Data Science and Business Analytics Course. Read further to learn more about her journey at Great Learning in her own words.
I am working with Oracle as Principal Application Engineer for the Payroll product and have 12 years of IT industry experience. I did my graduation with B.Tech in Electronics and Communication stream and joined Wipro as a campus recruit. I got the chance to work in Banking, Medical, and Payroll domain. I am married and have seven years old son. Being a woman, I have not faced any professional challenge at my work, but I have experienced that there is a lot of scope of improvement towards the way we deal with pregnant working women, be it related to their hikes, promotions, or allocating work to them. A woman is as dedicated as a man towards the work even during her pregnancy, and both should be treated equally, and the same holds true even post-maternity leave.
Being in the IT field, I have to be on my toes to keep on learning and moving with the work. With each switch to a new company or to a new team within a company, I have to be ready to take up the challenge of learning new technology, new products. Since I love to work on new and exciting stuff and wanted to get out of the monotonous work, I decided to learn something in demand and what could be a better choice than the Data Science field. Hence I joined the PGP -DSBA course from Great Learning. I always love to analyze stuff, be it work, people, or my surroundings. I found myself a perfect fit for this course as I have an eye for detail. When I started the course, I never had the idea that I would love it so much and get involved in it to such an extent that my family would sometimes complain about it. The key ingredients to succeed in this field are focus on your learning, analytical mind, look for details, and ability to make a story out of the numbers.
I guess for years, men have been more associated with Maths than women, and Stats being a part of Mathematics, women are a little less in number than men in the data science field, but things are changing. After joining this course, I have realized that with a basic understanding of stats also you can excel in this field, and there is not only maths involved in it but also the ability to think logically. If a person like me, who was never good at stats in her school days, could do good in her Data science class, then any woman can do it. Logical and analytical thinking are the only ingredients to persist in this field, and those should be promoted to attract more women towards it rather than the coding and stats part of it.
Advice to young females would be that if you love to play with numbers or are always intrigued by what lies in those large amounts of data, don’t worry about the math or coding part, come to the data science field, and you would love your work. Make a move to the field as early in your career as possible. The sooner, the better because with more experience, it’s always tough to start from the beginning.
I did my research on the various courses offered by different institutes for Data Science and found the Great Learning course to be most sought after, and the same was true once I got into it. The course is finely curated, keeping in mind that people from any field can take it and learn. The course is very well balanced, and we get the basic knowledge along with in-depth knowledge of machine learning algorithms. Python coding, along with the application of data science in various domains, is also very well covered in this course. After this course, I feel I have adequate knowledge about the Data science field. Starting from zero knowledge, I can now confidently talk about data science with others. It has helped me to participate and do well in various hackathons, even outside Great learning.
Being a working mother, it’s really very tough to learn something new and to challenge along with work and managing household chores. We have to keep the right balance between work, learning, and managing personal stuff. Continuous learning is a must. I had to juggle everything and had given equal priority to all of them. Late nights became norms for me since the day would go for office work and family, but the sacrifice and toil are worth it. Even sometimes, weekend plans would also need to be modified, and my family greatly supported me every time, including my seven years old son.
The newly acquired skill has helped me to think of ways to implement machine learning in my own professional work and utilize the numerous amounts of data generated by Payroll products. I have got several ideas to implement and, in a way, improve the product and make it more market competitive.
