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.
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.
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.
As I am all set to enter the final semester of my Masters degree, I am feeling extremely anxious. While most people are concerned about finding a full-time job in a state or company of their preference, for me that thought is still miles away. My immediate concern is how much I know as a data engineer/analyst. 18 months ago, I made the switch from product manager/actor/writer to Business Analytics student. The goal was to become proficient in the concepts of data mining and analysis, since it was a promising sector and the whole world seemed to be moving in a direction where every industry heavily relies on data science. Now, as I get closer to my graduation date, I keep questioning the extent of my knowledge. And to my disappointment, I keep coming across questions I do not know the answer to.
I need to fix this situation and quickly. I have 117 days to go until my graduation date (May 8, 2020). So, I am taking a start from scratch approach for now. The idea is to revise everything I have learnt at UTD as part of my course, followed by a couple of online courses and certifications. This includes the basics of statistics (p-value, hypothesis testing), database foundations, SQL, NoSQL, mining concepts like principal component analysis, regression techniques, clustering, time series, big data – Hadoop, Spark, Hive, language basics in Python and R, and data visualization techniques.
To devise a plan for this, I am contacting some students I look up to and asking for their advise on the best approach to ensure maximum retention. I am also hoping to audit some classes this final semester. I have just one class left to fulfill my graduation requirements but there is so much more I wish to learn. Natural Language Processing, Applied Machine Learning and Business Data Warehousing are my top picks. I have written to the professors asking for their permission to let me sit in on their lectures.
Finally, this will also be my last semester as the president of Travelytics – a club I conceived and founded with the help of some of my friends. After one final project presentation (Computer Vision with Python, OpenCV and Raspberry Pi), it will be time to hand over the reins of this organization to the next batch of students.
After 6 months at my first job in the United States, I decided to move on and pursue other avenues. I have several exciting academic projects and certifications lined up over the next few months. My facial recognition robot using Raspberry Pi, Python and OpenCV is almost done. I am preparing to appear for PMP and Cloudera Hadoop certification exams in January 2020, followed by AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam in February 2020. As I get closer to my graduation date (May 2020), I am raring to join the workforce and get my hands dirty solving some real world problems. My iCode internship has given me the push I needed to relaunch my technical career. I have summed up my Fall internship experience at iCode in this LinkedIn post.
