I have been conferred with several responsibilities as a PG Student Ambassador, CS Student Ambassador, and College Representative for Engineering and Physical Sciences and this has helped me in grooming my leadership skills and other interpersonal skills. Recently, I was invited to the Student-Vice Chancellor lunch where I got to personally meet our honorable Vice Chancellor Adam Tickell and can have a piece of advice on achieving better in life and career. I have also got a chance to represent my university on various platforms as a PG Student Ambassador. I have been able to make several projects by discussing with the professors and TAs and I believe that practical knowledge is essential in our postgraduate education.

The growing need of storing and managing data in every industry be it private or public requires Data Scientists to help make some critical decision making. It is essential to choose a university that gives you both practical and subjective knowledge for you to successfully transition into a Data Scientist. At the University of Birmingham, the course caters to the need of students where we have a plethora of resources to imbibe the knowledge that ultimately gives practical exposure through projects and labs. I have been able to gain the required skillset of a Data Scientist through the imparted knowledge and learning. In addition to this, the collaboration of UoB with The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence is another major reason as to why I applied to this course.

I was working with Vodafone as a Deputy Manager. I was involved with the Data Engineering projects to build the data pipelines and also perform ETL testing. In addition to this, I completed my Engineering in 2015 from India.

I would recommend first understanding why you want to become a Data Scientist. You need to be well-versed in the programming language Python, try to understand the importance of collecting data, and why every big to a small company is spending billions to store and manage the data. You need to have a clear plan in place for the one year that you will be dedicating to your master’s. Though everything will be taught from scratch it is essential to understand that one year is a short period for imparting complete knowledge of this vast subject so it is advisable to do some ground work before arriving on campus to pursue this course. Still, a lot of support is provided here by the School of Computer Science and the staff will try their best to give the students the most out of their investment. But as students, it is also our responsibility to be ready to put in effort. It is not a difficult subject as long as it is interesting for you. Just be relaxed and come with a positive mindset. It will be fun and a lifetime experience.

Among the various pros of this Data Science course, the way it has been structured is something I am ingrained in. In a short period of 1 year, the students are exposed to all the major modules and they are taught right from the foundation level the concepts of data warehouse, programming language (Python), and the concepts of machine learning. Right after the first semester, you will be in a position to start your job applications. There are projects in all the 3 semesters to give you avant-garde exposure closer to real-world scenarios in terms of data science projects.

There has to be a more meaningful answer to the question that why you want to become a data scientist to make your career transition easy and smooth. Though Data Science is a very lucrative career due to its pay, only having this as the reason will not be the right approach. I knew how the market is becoming very competitive, I realized the need for the required skillset with a PG degree from a top-notch institution can open up new avenues for me. My motivation was to become an expert in this field and have a degree in hand that could help me pave my way to build a great profile that I can present to a top-notch organization.