Cricket Piqued My Interest In A Data Science Career : Learn How
By- Abhishek Ghan, Board Infinity Alumni
1. Early Career Journey
My name is Abhishek Ghan. I finished my graduation in Mechanical Engineering in the year 2021. In my third year of engineering, I attended two Data Science Bootcamps at my college. This is where my fascination with Data Science started. Seeing how people were using internet data to gain an edge over their competitors fascinated me.
There are multiple instances that attracted me towards a Data Science career but one of the major ones is from a Data Science bootcamps I attended. I am a cricket fanatic and the instructor gave Rohit Sharma as an example of how he is so successful in the IPL, thanks to his team of analysts. We learned that Rohit uses the expertise of his analysts while developing strategies, and they go all out to help him. This piqued my interest to put in the effort and learn about the Data Science field myself.
As a result, I decided to pursue Data Science as a full-time career right after I finished engineering because I was so drawn to the field. Aside from this, mechanical engineering jobs were not very attractive at the time I graduated, and my interest in Data Science had developed by then rather than other IT fields.
Thankfully, one of my friends was already learning at Board Infinity. He was enrolled in the Full Stack Development course and I could receive honest feedback from him other than the thousands of positive reviews that I had read online. Everywhere Board Infinity was given a green flad and I decided to start my career transition journey with Board Infinity.
I am not much of a fan of online classes and luckily, Board Infinity also offered the option to take this course offline in a classroom. I was happy to find a course that suited all my criteria.
2. My Experience at Board Infinity
I enrolled myself in the Learning Path in Data Science Course at Board Infinity. I thoroughly enjoyed studying offline at Board Infinity after 1.5 years of attending online classes in college because of the pandemic.
Coming to the academic part, we started with the Excel module, followed by Tableau, and then upskilled ourselves in SQL, Python, and lastly Machine Learning. Coming from the Mechanical Engineering background, I was familiar with Excel. But, it was the first time I had heard of Tableau or acquainted myself with any other programming languages. Everything else was completely new to me.
However, my mentors at Board Infinity, Mr. Varun Kumar Anguralia, and Mr. Sufian Sheikh made the transition from non-IT background to the IT background very easy as they helped me learn everything from scratch.
The best part of learning from Board Infinity is the amount of practical learning that they assist you with. At the end of every module, we used to work on projects to comprehensively understand the skills through application. For my project, I chose the Zomato data set from Kaggle. We then moved to SQL, which I was completely unfamiliar with. For this project, we had to complete a set of assignments where we had to fetch the output using whatever queries we wanted.
As with Python, we were given outputs and had to write code for them. Lastly, I also built a movie recommendation system as a capstone project.
Since Python and Machine Learning were completely new to me, I sought special assistance from some websites and mentors. It was through that experience that I gained confidence in my newly learned skills. Apart from this, I also attended several recorded and live sessions as a part of my placement preparation program. These sessions were extremely helpful in guiding me to give interviews for several companies. I was also able to brush up on my soft skills because of these sessions under the guidance of my extremely knowledgeable coaches.
3. Placement Journey
Following my upskilling, I applied to almost all companies where I fit the job description and got shortlisted in 4-5, including Aislelab, where I currently work.
Before the interview round with Aislelab, I was given the company's dataset and was asked to pull out the insights in whichever way I wanted. However, the only requirement was that the insights shouldn't be obvious. As a result, I pulled data from insights and emailed them an excel file. My application for the Business Analyst required me to use Excel.
A few days later, I received a call saying that I had been shortlisted for the interview round. The interview round went for 1.5 hours. The questions ranged from basic information about myself to all the technical stuff, mostly from Excel. I was asked to implement the data set that I had worked on using Excel. I was also asked to share my screen to answer a few questions live. Thankfully, I was able to answer all the questions confidently.
My selection was confirmed to me by the company after 10 days.
Board Infinity taught me all the skills I needed to become a Business Analyst, but what I learned was that corporate life is so different from what I expected. Thankfully, I had industry professionals as coaches to guide me.
I have two pieces of advice for the learners. First, even if you have the best instructor, it won't matter if you don't put in the effort yourself, since you cannot expect to pick up Python or Machine Learning overnight if you come from a non-IT background. It takes time for these things to happen, so be patient.
And secondly, if you're applying for a job just be patient. You're going to get rejected a lot of times, you're going to face rejection from everywhere, whether you'll apply on other job portals or Board Infinity's job portal, you all are going to face rejection. Just make you're that you have a resume that displays your skills and projects in the right way. I would recommend that if you have made the resume just go to your friend, colleague, or mentor, show your resume, get feedback and make the necessary changes. You may have the best technical and communication skills, but if you don't have a good resume, the interviewer will not shortlist you for the interview round.
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