Last summer I worked with a Game of thrones dataset for a visualization project. I was planning to revisit that dataset to unravel some more mysteries, when it occurred to me that I should look for something similar with my current favorite – The Office.
I found this wonderful dataset of lines from the show. It has dimensions like Speaker and Seasons making it a tempting dataset for a Tableau exercise. The first thing that came to mind was to get into Michael’s business – That’s What She Said!
Nothing surprising here – Michael obviously stands out! I was also interested in looking at the lines from a sentiment analysis point of view. It turns out that not many people laugh in the show (at least that’s what the script says). An analysis of the lines revealed some unusual observations –
Angela talks more than Oscar, and Toby talks more than Stanley
Dwight laughs more than Pam, and Toby more than Oscar
Looking at both these dashboards together, you can see that –
Season 4 has the maximum number of “That’s what she said”s but the lowest lines with characters laughing.
You can find the dashboard on my github page. I wanted to explore this further but I came across this amazing Tableau Public workbook, and this brilliant article where the author goes into data mining with R and word frequencies and character correlations. These are great inspirations for me to explore some other datasets and come up with interesting insights and dashboards.
I have been maintaining a countdown to graduation on a white board in my room. I started 616 days ago. This board has witnessed my journey more closely than anyone or anything else. It has seen the hundreds of activities I planned. It knows the ones that I checked off with a sense of pride and accomplishment. It has also seen the ones I erased after getting disheartened by unsuccessful attempts. It has observed the extent of my dreams and laughed at the ridiculousness of some of them. Sometimes, it has even served as a canvas for the artistic endeavors of my creative friends. But more than anything, it has been my companion that has kept me grounded and aligned. In many ways, this board is the Wilson to my Chuck Noland. This is what the board reads today.
What an incredible two years, these have been! There is no way I can find the words to describe exactly how I feel. So many new experiences, so many new friends, so many memories worth cherishing! I have tried to blog about it in bits and pieces but there’s so much more to these two years than what I have penned down. I desperately wanted to become a student again after almost 10 years in the work force. And my life at UTD turned out to be everything I had expected and more! It’s going to be difficult to say goodbye.
I completed my engineering in 2008. The world got hit by a recession. I am completing my Master’s degree in 2020. We are in the midst of a pandemic. Looks like I pick the worst years to graduate. My flatmate jokes that next time I plan to study again, I should inform him in advance so that he can be prepared! But may be there is a lesson here. Everything that happened since 2008 got me where I am today. And you know what? I did alright. I am still here – studying, working, enjoying myself, making new friends, looking forward to the next chapter. This tells me that despite everything that’s been happening, I will be okay. And so will each one of you!
The first picture I took of UTD – August 2018
That brings me to the man who reinstated my faith in myself and the process. Dr. Ganesh Janakiraman is a man of few words. It’s a shame that I met him so late in my Master’s journey. His Operations Management class is one of the most engaging, exciting, and productive classes I have taken not just at UTD, but in my life. But that’s not the only reason I am grateful to this brilliant professor. It’s because of his kindness as a human being. I met him outside of class for the first time in his office to discuss the results of a test. Ever since the day we had that chat, Dr. Janakiraman has been an encouraging voice and a driving force. In the past few months, when times have become tough and it’s so easy for me to doubt myself and get boggled by the uncertainty of what the future holds, his words have inspired me to stay strong. Every time I have a conversation (mostly email) with Dr. Janakiraman, there’s this voice inside me that goes – YOU GOT THIS. Like he says – “The process might be slow but that only means we go ahead with more energy.”
Dear Dr. Janakiraman, if you’re reading this – Your kind and genuine efforts to help me out during this phase have moved me. All your teachings and advice will stay with me forever, and play a big role in whatever becomes of me.
And on that note, it’s time to bring this 10-article series to a close with a quote by another profound man. The great Indian actor Irrfan Khan left us a few days ago. Before he did, he left this pearl of wisdom for his son and I think it applies to each one of us, especially now more than ever –
“Learn to surrender to the dance of uncertainty and trust your faith in the universe.”
This is the tenth and final article of my #10DaysToGraduate series where I share 10 key lessons from my Master’s degree in the form of a countdown to May 8 (today), my graduation date. Time to start over.
One of the advantages of the Information Technology and Management program at The University of Texas at Dallas is that it has the perfect curriculum design for learning the fundamentals of many pillars of IT. Of course, it is important to pick one focus and develop your skills in it. But with every passing day, the tech industry is evolving in a way where cross-functions and integrations are the norm. You need to be able to wear many hats. So, it makes sense to explore topics which might not really be your focus, but still fall in the technology umbrella. This is why, I was happy with my decision of taking IT Security and IT Audit and Risk Management, two subjects that enhanced my basic knowledge of some of the most promising and vital aspects of Information Technology.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
My cyber security class, led by the profound Prof. Nate Howe, was eye-opening as it got me well-versed with so many IT risk and security aspects. I understood the entire structure of IT security functions in an organization with a sneak peek into responsibilities of the Chief Information Security Officer. The class took me to interesting avenues like the CIA objective, Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery, ransomware and the anatomy of an attack, TCP/IP basics, secure – SDLCs and IT Control Frameworks. The class ended on a high note with guest speakers and industry professionals coming in to give demos of Kali Linux and penetration testing. It sure got me excited about exploring Kali Linux more, in the future.
The IT Audit and Risk Management class was a lot of fun, despite being so full of theory. This was because of the cool Prof. Joseph Mauriello, who always kept us engaged with his sense of humor and class-end quizzes. This class was the reason I became a member of the student chapter of ISACA – a club that had the best meet-ups and the most delicious food. In Prof. Mauriello’s class, I learnt the fundamentals of auditing IT governance controls, operating system and network controls, types of DOS attacks, and Risks associated with different IT functions and ERP systems. It is thanks to this class, that I know about the ACL software, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and the Fraud triangle.
The IT Audit group
While these subjects were not in line with my analytics focus, taking them was absolutely worth it as they served as essentials training of fundamental IT concepts. I also made some really cool friends (Hi Micah, Marie, Jeyaraj, Chloe, Diksha!) whom I enjoyed spending classwork and project time with. And that brings us to the professor, whom I have thanked several times but my series cannot be complete without him. I call him Master Yoda for without his guidance, I wouldn’t have been able to walk even two steps in this long path. I’m talking about the Program Director of MS Business Analytics at UTD, Dr. Bill Hefley.
Team Travelytics with Dr. Hefley
You might think that it is weird for me to be talking about Dr. Hefley in a post describing my experience in subjects that do not fall under his Business Analytics domain. But that is precisely why Dr. Hefley is an extremely special teacher to me. I had joined UTD as a MS BA student and had moved to ITM after my first semester as it aligned better with my experience and goals. Despite this, Dr. Hefley has continued to be my guardian angel. As faculty advisor for Travelytics, he has made sure everyone in our team has someone to go to. To me personally, he has been someone I can always write to (and I hope it continues to be that way) or walk up to. Every interaction with him has been warm and comforting. With his fun one-liners and cheerful yet informative emails, he is someone who is always there to cheer me up and keep me going. So, at the risk of boring you with my gratitude one more time, Dr. Hefley – THANK YOU.
This is the ninth post of my #10DaysToGraduate series where I share 10 key lessons from my Master’s degree in the form of a countdown to May 8, my graduation date.
I was always fascinated with the idea of working on-campus. I did not want to take a risk in the first year of my education at The University of Texas at Dallas as I was back to school after a decade. It made sense to get into the groove with assignments and exams without any distractions. I did however get involved in theatre and cultural activities. Then came my internship which also kept me occupied and taught me a lot. So it was only in my last semester that I actually got an opportunity to work on-campus, thanks to a reference from my friend Sandeep. And it was none other than the UTD bookstore, one of the most beautiful and lively places on campus. And it was here that I learnt some invaluable lessons of management and operations.
To start with, this was my first time working in retail. I have a lot of experience working summer jobs at call-centres in India but I had never done anything related to retail. So, right off the bat, I was amazed by the daily functions of the job. I was also extremely impressed with the way my co-workers excelled at everything they did. Almost all of them were undergraduate students working part-time. But they had mastered every aspect of the job and were kind and humble enough to patiently teach me all of it. Thanks to these lovely kids, I now know a good deal about managing the sales floor, operating the register, packaging merchandise, shipping out online order and also processing returns. It was also interesting to spend time in the warehouse and understand inventory management.
The team of UTD bookstore
My time at the UTD bookstore (run by Follett Higher Education Services), although short, taught me how you can have a ball and learn a lot at the same time. It also has an emotional value as the bookstore is the place on campus where you find all the official UTD merchandise and souvenirs. When you work there all day, surrounded by UTD shirts and sweatpants and key chains and hats, you feel a sense of belonging. It is where you truly feel proud to be a comet!
I have fond memories with each and everyone of the bookstore employees – Amanda, Jessica, Heidi, Rosa, Bella, Tiara, Chirag, Brijan, Nicole, Rhea, Lynn, Antonio, Jaret, Graham, Akena, Gisele, and Catherine – what a beautiful bunch! The UTD bookstore is the very definition of a happy workplace with music, and smiling workers (some of whom are huge fans of The Office), and colorful backdrops. And the person responsible for making sure this place has such a great vibe is the store manager, Rawn Johnson.
Right from the day I met Rawn, I knew he is this wonderful human being who is such a positive influence for everyone around him. He is extremely warm and affectionate towards all his employees. Of course, there are days when you want to make sure you don’t do anything that might piss him off. But mostly, he is just a humorous, fun-loving, story-telling, coffee-drinking boss who wants everyone to have a great life. Whether it is buying cup-cakes for people on happy occasions, or making everyone read “The Energy Bus” when they are on-the-clock, Rawn does a great number of things to ensure that the UTD bookstore is a workplace people want to come back to every morning. He also throws a little “You’re now dead to us!” party when someone is leaving (yep, he did that for me!).
If you are reading this Rawn – it’s been a true pleasure to know and work with you. I have learnt a great deal from you about how to build a strong, efficient team while making sure its members are happy and healthy. I shall strive to become a manager like you.
This is the eighth post of my #10DaysToGraduate series where I share 10 key lessons from my Master’s degree in the form of a countdown to May 8, my graduation date.
Yes, this is not directly related to anything else I have done in my Master’s program. But solar desalination was an interest of mine even before I got to UTD. In fact, I have always dreamt of a day when I will have enough money and motivation to start a solar desalination firm to help solve the water crisis. So, when I mentioned this to Prof. Gaurav Shekhar, he was kind enough to agree to be my faculty advisor for an independent study on desalination and its business opportunities. And that is no. 5 in my countdown to graduation!
My weekly desalination meetings with Prof. Shekhar involved a whole lot of brain-storming to come up with questions to be answered, people to be approached, possible routes to be taken. In my research, I went through everything from the process of desalination, and current industry size to challenges, and breakthrough research being done in the sector. I joined the International Desalination Association and interacted with researchers on Researchgate. I tried to look for datasets to desalination with data analytics, and come up with machine learning solutions to reduce operational costs. There wasn’t enough data available on the Internet. I looked into transport and deliver,y but that was taking me in a different direction.
Image: CNBC
Finally, the ray of hope came in the form of a research paper about a fabricated membrane with breakthroughs in the use of solar energy to convert seawater to potable water. I contacted the author and will be trying to pursue this direction in the time to come. At the end, my study report was a comprehensive documentation of the process I followed, the roadblocks I faced, the data I found, and the progress I made in exploring business opportunities in desalination. This was a great exercise in research and management, and I am optimistic that it will yield results in the future.
When I clicked ‘Submit’ to turn in my report, it was the first time that the feeling sunk in – my Master’s degree was coming to an end. My meetings with Prof. Shekhar, one of the finest humans and problem-solvers I have ever met, were coming to an end. After a decade in the workforce, I had taken a break and come back to school. That break was almost over. It was the beginning of the end of an era.
This is the seventh post of my #10DaysToGraduate series where I share 10 key lessons from my Master’s degree in the form of a countdown to May 8, my graduation date.
For the past 20 months, this question has been answered by two contradicting voices in my head. The first voice, that has the personality of a sane, organized, professional human, encourages me to focus on numbers and metrics, and sticking to the point, and tweaking the Resume as per corporate guidelines, and following pre-defined templates, and using popular keywords. The other voice is a vagabond and a rebel shouting – “Why follow the format? Let’s add pictures and colors and mention everything that makes you cool. How else would you stand out?” Right from the first semester, I have been struggling to settle the dispute between these two voices. As a result, my Resume now looks like their marriage certificate.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Despite having worked on my Resume several times in the past, it took me a lot of trial and error to get to the one I am currently using to apply for jobs. In fact, it is still evolving and changes with most job applications depending upon the job role and company. There are several reasons why it was particularly challenging for me to nail down a good Resume. First – my profile is a bit weird. My experience over the past decade (after completing my Engineering in Electronics and Telecommunication) ranges from Product Manager at an IT book publishing firm to Bollywood actor to flood relief volunteer to travel content writer and team manager to graduate student. Trying to display everything I want in one page proved to be a bit of a challenge.
Second – I am targeting two types of roles – one that aligns more with my past experience and another that aligns with my recent education and career interest. Coming up with two perfect sales pitches for these two different types of jobs was an interesting challenge but something that I thoroughly enjoyed. After a lot of trial and error, and leaving out a bunch of stuff I thought makes me “awesome”, I was able to make some progress.
Thankfully, you are never alone in the resume-building process. My resume-building journey began with the Professional Development class in Fall 2018. I then took a trip to the Career Management Center at UTD where most of what I had put down was crossed out and I was given a new, professional format. It helped me get my experience in the STAR format with metrics showcasing how my work actually accounted to achieving something for my firm. I tweaked it a bit as per my personality. But at one point I got carried away. One of the biggest blunders I made was included a terrible picture of myself working on a project in my Resume, thinking that it will make me stand out. A recruiter at the UTD career fair rightly gave me an earful saying that such a Resume is extremely difficult to read, and the ATS will never pick something like this up.
So, I decided to grow the hell up and act like a professional. I cleaned up the format, removed my picture, and tried to paint it with my words. Over a period of time, I also asked friends and colleagues to review my resume, all of whom gave me great (sometimes contradicting) feedback. I also used a lot of advice given by Austin Belcak on LinkedIn and in his emails (yes, I am a subscriber). Thanks to his expertise and some very helpful tips from major corporations like Google and MIT, I think I have two Resumes that can get the job done. Whether they really get me a job is still to be seen.
This is the sixth post of my #10DaysToGraduate series where I share 10 key lessons from my Master’s degree in the form of a countdown to May 8, my graduation date.
My on-and-off relationship with Python began a few months before I started my Master’s degree. When I knew that I was going to turn towards IT, it was a no brainer that I had to raise my coding game. I had learned C programming during my engineering days but that was almost a decade ago. So, to go back to my roots, I took a weekend course in object-oriented programming with Java. While it was a lot of fun, it became clear to me that Java, though brilliant, was more of a mobile app development tool (no offense, Java lovers!). There was another language that reigned over the data science kingdom and for any chance of success as a data analyst, I had to woo her.
I started learning Python with the MIT OCW course (edX) on Introduction to computational programming with Python to understand the basic data structures and some beginner-level programs. While I got through the basics, I could not complete this course as, after a point, I found it to be a bit dry. And that was that. At UTD, I was already making good progress in my analytics learning trajectory thanks to my work with R programming. So there was no need to hurry things up with another language. However, as things progressed with my club Travelytics, and I came across competitions online, I couldn’t delay getting my hands dirty with Python anymore.
So, I dived right in with Kaggle Learn‘s wonderful data science track which started with 7 hours of Python, including all the basics from variables, lists, loops and functions to important libraries and elementary programs. This was followed by my internship at iCode where I worked with Python projects and also trained over 50 students in the foundations of Python and machine learning. The hands-on exercises and projects at iCode, like building a movie recommender system, were of great help in laying down the foundations of Python for data science in my brain.
Joseph Kim in one of his Python sessions at UTD
Back at UTD, it helped that my friend, Joseph Kim, who was the President of the data science club, conducted some amazing hands-on sessions for people to learn Python basics. Attending these sessions helped me, and many others, stay in the loop (pun totally intended). Then came my own Python research for my facial recognition project to solve crime tourism, at the end of which I had adapted three simple python programs that detect and recognize faces in real time. This was my most memorable time spent with Python programming, as I was able to see some tangible results generated by code written by me.
In the last few months, I have been following the extraordinary free YouTube lessons of Krishna Naik. His Machine Learning playlist is the most valuable resource I have found online that helps me practise everything from the use of impressive data science libraries like NumPy, Pandas and scikit learn to data visualization exercises with matplotlib and Seaborn. He is also an excellent coach in analytics concepts like entropy and Gini impurity, and machine learning algorithms like regression, k-means clustering, k-nearest neighbors, decision trees and ensemble methods.
We are truly fortunate to live in a world and time where so many resources are available for anyone who has an Internet connection and wants to learn. I am currently working my way through Kiril Eremenko’s well-acclaimed Udemy course on Python for data science. While all these wonderful online resources have their charm, nothing comes close to in-class training. This became evident in my object-oriented programming class with Dr. Nassim Sohaee. Her diligent classwork and challenging assignments, which I am still working on, have been excellent tools to help me understand the nuts and bolts of object-oriented design and the anatomy of Python programming. I have worked in various projects dealing with loops, functions, classes, inheritance and exception handling. In addition to all the data science exercises, this class has helped me gain more confidence in leveraging Python as a powerful programming language in the time to come.
This is the fifth post of my #10DaysToGraduate series where I share 10 key lessons from my Master’s degree in the form of a countdown to May 8, my graduation date.
“Be who you are” – such a simple thing to say and yet so difficult to follow. My fourth article in this series is about just that. For those of you who are not familiar with me – I spent the last decade trying to make it in Bollywood. While I acted in a bunch of cool films and web videos (you can find them on my Projects page), I didn’t make the cut. So when I started my Master’s program in Business Analytics, I believed it was the end of the actor in me. I just took a chance in August 2018 by writing to the UTD Arts and Humanities department asking if there was any theatre activity I can be part of. And like an angel, Prof. Shelby-Allison Hibbs responded to my email saying I should audition for Julius Caesar. It’s been two years now and I have acted in four plays at UTD. That’s more than I had done in the last two years before I came to the United States.
The Rocky Horror Show – November 2019
My theatre mentor, Mr. Neeraj Kabi, always worked with people from various professions and maintained that EVERYONE should be involved in the theatre. It can teach you to come out of your shell, or it can teach you to connect with your inner self. It can help you communicate better, or it can show you the power of silence and listening. In the past two years, I have been able to relive everything that I love about the Arts. But besides that, it has honed some of the most valuable skills in my professional life. The way the cast and crew of Julius Caesar worked together for months was a lesson in teamwork. The writing and creation of A Mirror Right Through You was product innovation at its best. Rocky Horror‘s scale of production and unparalleled success taught me how an innovative marketing campaign can win the day. And Faust has been a lesson in adapting well to the most unprecedented changes and using your voice as a powerful instrument! Every play has been an epitome of brilliant concept-to-launch production of something most people across the globe want to buy.
A Mirror Right Through You – March 2019
Each one of these plays has been a unique experience in itself, teaching me something new. I have met, worked with, and learned from exceptional artists. I have made friends for life who have reinstated my faith in myself. I am much better now at trusting the process and staying calm in the eye of uncertainty and distress. My experience with UTD Theatre has reminded me that despite my failed Bollywood career, I will always continue to be an actor. A career in IT doesn’t have to mean that I stop acting. In fact, acting and theatre might very well be what keeps me focused and driven to achieve my goals in life. And this lesson is going to be key in my years looking forward.
Julius Caesar – November 2018
Acting has played a huge role in forming my personality and contributed massively in building my confidence. Every time I speak in public with passion, every time I empathize with customers to solve a problem, every time I work with a cross-functional team to generate revenue, I will remember that I owe it to theatre. It was and will always be a part of my life.
You can check out UTD Theatre’s latest play Fausthere.
This is the fourth post of my #10DaysToGraduate series where I share 10 key lessons from my Master’s degree in the form of a countdown to May 8, my graduation date.
I had understood very early on while learning the basics of data science that the three pillars of a sturdy analytics structure are statistics, a programming language, and database management. So, after covering the first two in my previous posts, it’s natural that I move to database foundations.
During Fall 2018, I started learning the basics of databases in Dr. James Scott’s class. The man is a gifted speaker and entertainer. His class was full of marvelous impressions, anecdotes from his variety of experiences, and exciting PowerPoint presentations. It was here that I understood the concept of data modeling with topics like primary and foreign keys, Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD) , schemas and sub-schemas, weak and strong relationships, and Normalization . However, the most important part of this class was that it got me started in one THE MOST IN-DEMAND TOOL asked for in every job role I desire – SQL!
Photo by Tobias Fischer on Unsplash
As my friend Ankita loves saying – SELECT is written in our star(*)s. It was a delight to work on class assignments that tested our knowledge of dependencies, NULL values, SQL functions, relational operators, joins, sub-queries, and views. We also got into the basics of transaction management using SQL. And since we had worked extensively with Relational Databases for most part of the class, Dr. Scott spent the last leg of our semester teaching us the basics of NoSQL and MongoDB. It formed a great runway for my future big data endeavors.
My SQL and database learning during this semester culminated with a project where I got my hands dirty with some data munging, database modeling and even regression using SQL and R. Just cleaning this data before we can perform any kind of retrieval was a task in itself. Thanks to this class, I find myself proficient in creating ERDs, working with various SQL joins and clauses to retrieve simple as well as aggregated data from complex data sets.
This is the third post of my #10DaysToGraduate series where I share 10 key lessons from my Master’s degree in the form of a countdown to May 8, my graduation date.
When a class is named after your graduation major, and one of the most popular disciplines in the present world, you know it’s going to be pivotal in your learning path. BA with R proved to be just that. The brilliant Dr. Sourav Chatterjee made it clear right at the beginning that R programming is going to be used just as a tool (which it is) to understand and master the nuances of business analytics. Having said that, his course material left no stone unturned in taking us through all aspects of R programming needed for data science.
I had worked a bit with Java and PHP, but this was my first experience with the R programming language. I started with an introductory course on Datacamp to quickly learn the very basics of R like vectors, matrices and data frames. Then, in class, Dr. Chatterjee proved to be a dedicated and patient professor as he started with basic manipulations and sample generation in R and then quickly moving to the foundations of data analytics. We got familiar with libraries like tidyverse, forecast, gplots and toyed with data visualization using ggplot on some interesting data sets. We created several plots, graphs, charts, and heatmaps, before scaling up to larger data sets.
This was followed by some of the most important things a business analyst/data scientist learns in his career. So far, everything looked pretty straight forward to me but now was the time to push boundaries and actually dive deep into analytics. I was introduced to dimension reduction, correlation matrix and the all-important analytics task of principal component analysis (PCA). I learnt how to evaluate performance of models, create lift and decile charts, and classification with the help of a confusion matrix – all with just a few lines of code. As Dr. Chatterjee explained time and again, it was never about the code. It was about knowing when and how to use it and what to do with the result.
Dr. Sourav Chatterjee’s BA with R class
We then followed the natural analytics progression with linear and multiple regression where I learned about partitioning of data and generating predictions. This was followed by a thorough understanding of the KNN model and how and when to run it. By now, I was beginning to get a hand of problem statements and the approach to take to solve them, thanks to class assignments on real-world scenarios like employee performance and spam detection. Through the examples done in class, it was easy to grasp the concepts of R-squared value, p-value and the roles they play in model evaluation. It was in this class that I understood logistic regression, discriminant analysis, association rules for the first time and I have been working on them ever since, in every data science course or project that I have taken up.
All of this knowledge and Dr. Chatterjee’s guidelines were put to use in the final project where I worked with a group led by the talented Abhishek Pandey on London cabs data. After rigorous work on large data sets downloaded/extracted from various sources, we trained a model to predict arrival times for cabs by comparing RMSE across random forests, logistic regression, and SVMs. It was a great way to put into practice everything we had learned over four months.
And with that, I had laid a robust foundation in data analytics, and was ready to build it further in the time to come. By January 2019, I was confident to dive into analytics projects and work on complex data sets to generate prediction models using the tools taught by Dr. Saurav Chatterjee.
This is the second post of my #10DaysToGraduate series where I share 10 key lessons from my Master’s degree in the form of a countdown to May 8, my graduation date.
