Megha Kansal shows us how working hard towards your goals will surely help you achieve them. She talks about her journey with Great Learning’s PGP Data Science and Business Analytics Course. Read further to learn more about her experience with Great Learning.
I am Megha Kansal, having a total of 9.5 years of experience in the field of IT. I am currently working with Genpact as a Manager – Data Scientist.
I always wanted to go for Fashion Designing or Hotel Management, but due to the discontent with my family and relatives, I had to drop the idea. During the IT recession in 2009, after completing B-Tech in the same year, I worked unpaid for many months along with job hunting. In Dec’10, I started my career journey from NTT.DATA as a Test Engineer. Unfortunately, I had to leave my job due to personal reasons.
Then I restarted my journey with HCL Technologies Noida as a Senior Software Engineer. I got an opportunity to work on a critical customer-facing project where I had to work in my nth gear to meet the expectations.
I had also faced major challenges while accomplishing the same. My efforts were praised by customers and management, but in the man’s world, I faced major challenges in terms of growth and skill enhancement opportunities. All these had made me change my perception of people.
I wanted a transition in my career as I was also getting exhausted doing the monotonous work for many years with no growth. But due to 6 years of experience in testing and being married with lots of responsibilities, I had a fear of taking risks about my career as well as on the personal front.
My first step to transition in my career was to break the fear within me first. I took guidance from many highly experienced and ended up with an analysis that whosoever is working on any technology. They were guiding for the same. Parallelly, my own research was going on, and back of my mind, I was a little bit interested in learning Data Science. During my research, I was getting calls from multiple institutes, including Great Lakes, for their PGP program. And I trusted my intuition to go for Great Lakes. I took admission at Great Learning and worked hard to achieve my career goal.
During my one year of Great Lakes journey, I had to manage my office, studies, all household activities and needed to balance my social life as well. I usually felt my days were short and tasks were more. And also I had spent a huge amount on my studies, not only money but I spent time and effort. Sometimes, I couldn’t give much time to my family.
During project submission in Great Lakes, I started looking out for a job change in Data Science. And one thing I promised myself was that I would not affect my mind with rejections coz I knew, being new into Data Science, I have to face multiple rejections. I trusted myself and kept giving interviews. It was all learning for me. Based on the previous interview questions, I started preparing for future interviews. Then slowly, I started clearing the technical rounds. I started getting offers from three companies.
I joined Genpact as a Manager-Data Scientist. One of the happiest moments in my life, and to my surprise, I am directly reporting to the AVP. Just after that, I started getting calls from people in my previous organization, congratulating me, and even wanted to know the secret of how I achieved this grand success where people are thinking about studying Data Science, and I am a Data Scientist already.
Now I started working as a Data Scientist. One more achievement was, I wrote my first article (Principal Component Analysis), an opportunity given by Great Learning, and it was published. Sometimes my work used to be very hectic. I am also a part of one of the big and well-known yoga and meditation foundations for the past five years. Yoga and Meditation gave me inner strength and a focused mind. Now I am a senior volunteer and going to be a teacher.
After a few months, I got an opportunity to create an end-to-end Data Science course for one of the e-learning platforms. And within a couple of months, I created and published a Data Science course too.
I wanted to tell all Women to trust in themselves. Whenever a woman makes a decision for herself, it never goes wrong. Get out of your fears, comfort zone and be independent. Take risks and take steps for yourself. Get out of toxic relationships, get out of a toxic office environment, fight for yourself.
