Learning to weave data stories

Everyone has a different learning curve for growth and a special reason to achieve it. A Bachelor of Technology in Information Technology, Dipannita Banerjee decided to go down the Analytics route due to her sheer curiosity to know more about IBM Watson (Watson is an IBM supercomputer that combines artificial intelligence and sophisticated analytical software to optimize the performance as a “question answering” machine) and how it takes decisions based on data analytics and statistical models.

“I started researching and reading articles on Google about analytics and realized that data science, mainly, is a combination of 3 things – Business knowledge, Statistics and Coding. As I have always been comfortable with Math and coding, I almost immediately knew that I was going to pursue a career in this domain and that is how my analytics journey began,” beams Dipannita.

She was working at IBM as a SAP Security consultant and thus did not have any industrial experience in the analytics domain but was determined to learn the topics that would help her shift to the space she had slowly but steadily started falling in love with.

“I did my capstone project on NSDC dataset, which was pretty close to the real-world messy dataset. Our dataset was full of categorical variables. We had to make adjustments to it so that our model could make sense of those variables and provide a good prediction”, explains Dipannita, who is now considering and looking to explore Artificial Intelligence and Natural language processing as well. In short, the capstone project gave her a glimpse of the real-world dataset and the approaches to covert a disorganized dataset into a more usable one.

We believe that when the focus is on data and understanding them, step-by-step, there is definitely a way to make sense of the chaos. In her words, while once upon a time, she used to stare at numbers that appeared on articles, online papers, blogs and other written pieces with statistics and data, now (after completing the Postgraduate Program in Data Science and Machine Learning (PGPDM)) all the pieces seem to have come together and have started making complete sense to her.

The program is a blend of data science, deep learning, business analytics, visualization and project management education with the application of advanced analytics models for artificial intelligence, deep learning and cognitive computing.

Designed to give students a comprehensive analytics education with a combination of online and in-person sessions, projects and seminars by industry leaders and hands-on learning in the Jigsaw Lab, PGPDM has already made a significant impact, being ranked #2 in the ‘Top 10 Executive Data Sciences Courses in India’ by Analytics India Magazine for 2017 & 2018.

“I was quite nervous about taking my baby steps into the unknown world of analytics. But when I saw the program plan and design, I almost instantly understood that the course was built in such a way, that even a novice in technology could excel in the program – with basic math by his or her side. I mean, every possible topic was included in PGPDM, from basic excel to SQL query to Python coding and that is when I knew that I’m going to confidently enroll for this program. Getting the best of both worlds (Jigsaw Academy, one of the top analytics institutes of India and University of Chicago’s Graham School, one of the most prestigious colleges in the world) was just an icing on the cake,” Dipannita recalls.

Finally, when asked what stood out in the program, she had a lot of amazing things to say – “I would say, the help from the Jigsaw team and the University of Chicago’s Graham School faculty I got and continue to get are amazing. Whenever I reach out with a query to Jigsaw and UC, I get prompt replies with a detailed explanation about it. This is one main reason that, I believe, made me feel that I wasn’t alone in this journey and that was why I never questioned my decision to enroll for the PGPDM. I got help in CV writing to preparation for the interview – which is typically not included in the course. But Jigsaw Academy was more than happy to do this as well and I’m extremely grateful for this,” she says.

To start your journey towards learning to weave data stories, enroll today!