Concentration: Data Analytics

Tell us a bit about yourself and your IT background.

Being an early morning person, I love to go on long walks, I enjoy doing evening Yoga, cooking my favorite Indian recipes, painting, riding motorbikes, listening to music specially a blend of genres involving electronic music, jazz, blues, and soul.

I have worked as a software engineer for 6 years in the IT industry back in India, Pune for three different multinational companies across various verticals. Majorly, my work involved dealing with client-side and product pipeline deployments, management and testing for major releases. Over these years I am very passionate about learning newer technologies that are being adopted at the workplace and skills needed to support the same. I believe there is lot of room for self-development and refine my technical skills as former software engineer.

In my previous experience, I have achieved various accolades from different clients in terms of project delivery including: Winner of Nokia do good hackathon in 2013, Kudos from Cognizant best performance award in 2015, Best performer in Cybage for a Singapore client-based team in 2017 followed by an early promotion, and Best performer in terms of handling most critical functionalities in Xoriant 2020.

Why did you choose to attend the ITWS program at RPI?

I decided to join Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to pursue master’s in ITWS program which is flexible enough to choose the subjects of my interests such as Database Applications, Data Analytics, Machine Learning. Along with that, RPI is highly regarded among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity" in computation and information technology.

What kinds of research projects have you undertaken at RPI?

I am currently involved in a data analytics project related to a critical infrastructure project for NASA, in which I am predicting a risk index for the Aircraft facilities depending on various factors.

Tell us about being a TA in the ITWS program.

Being a Teaching Assistant is lot of fun but it is also a serious part-time job. It requires good amount of work each week to stay on top of material and make sure that the students are getting the most from the course. I try to make sure that each student is having best learning experience possible. There is nothing more rewarding when I notice the smile on their faces when they finally receive expected outputs. It also helps me review the material and understand it at a deeper level.

Beyond having a great experience at teaching, I have been bought into an amazing community of meticulous, intellectual, and generous students. I am so grateful to Prof. Goldschmidt and Prof. Sturman for giving me this opportunity. Through this I have received a new perspective towards my professors, and it made me appreciate how much work goes on behind the scenes for each class.

What have been some of your favorite classes and class experiences at RPI?

All the subjects that I have chosen, have helped to strengthen my technical skills and previous work experience. It’s difficult for me to choose a favorite, however I can cite few of the best moments as an RPI graduate student. Case study on the live project in Database and application class led me to interact with the development team at Google and understand their application in depth. I enjoyed my BIES midterm case study on Netflix. Lastly, working on the NASA critical infrastructure project has exposed me to different machine learning and AI models.

Tell us about grad student life, from your experience.

It is exciting to be part of RPI graduate experience. Everything is fun and have its own learning curve. Each day I try to learn something new in my life.

What advice would you give to prospective graduate students considering the ITWS program at RPI?

The student-faculty ratio at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is 14:1. Hence, you will not get a feeling of a small fish in a big pond. ITWS program’s flexibility to choose core and elective subjects from its pool of courses is remarkable. Professors in ITWS program are extremely supportive they go beyond their call of duty in terms of helping students and holding office hours. They know their materials inside out and are exceptionally skilled in terms of teaching them.