My education path in data sciences

I’ve always listened to what my instincts said and now that I look in retrospect, I am glad that I did so. My choice of Information Technology (IT) as major for undergraduate studies in 2014 was more of an impulse than through a well thought about career plan. However, as semesters went by I started enjoying IT not only as a subject of study but also as a future career. While I enjoyed most of the IT related subjects, particularly subjects like Database Management, Data Mining and Business Analytics have started holding my interest and attention immensely. This interest is now turned into a desire to dig deeper into Data Sciences. I believe that pursuing a Master degree in Data Sciences will be the right step to achieve my goal.

Right from my childhood, I had this natural interest towards mathematics. Adding to this, quantitative and analytical abilities have always been my strengths. These abilities combined with my academic excellence have benefited me to obtain an admission into VNR Vignana Jyothi Institute of Engineering and Technology, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, one of the top three colleges in the city of Hyderabad. I took Information Technology as the major course of study for my Bachelor’s degree. A well-organized and exhaustive curriculum combined with experienced professors, have made sure that I got a great understanding of the fundamentals of the logical, statistical, and scientific principles, emphasizing computing and information processing. Furthermore, the practical learning techniques implemented in our college have helped me in grasping the fundamentals of core subjects in my stream viz., Data mining, Advanced Business Analytics, Database Management Systems, Object Oriented Programming, Design and Analysis of Algorithms etc. During the sixth semester of my undergraduate studies, I worked on a capstone project entitled “ Finance Data Project”. In this project, we have focused on exploratory data analysis and visualization of stock prices of various banks and how they have progressed throughout the financial crisis all the way to early 2016.

This project gave me a practical insight into the potential of data analytics. Additionally, as part of my major project in the final semester of my course, I along with three of my classmates have built a clinical decision support system for the diagnosis of diabetes. This project is also related to data analysis and prediction. This decision support system will be assisting the doctors in accurately predicting the risk of diabetes attack for a particular patient. This work stood out as one of the top projects in our college and also got a special appreciation from the Principal. Furthermore, we have communicated with Indian Citation Index (ICI) for a publication of a research paper, which is currently under review.