IIM Ahmedabad to Praxis. Learning Data, a journey to be relished, each step of the way. Part 2

Okay, so first things first. The cheesecake was so so.

Link to the appetiser. Read.

And Mr Noob, with a ladle and a cooking spud, made his way to the kitchen to make something exciting to name it “Chicken Biriyani and Chicken Chap”. Wish luck to Mr Newbie Chef who is religiously foodie for his new adventures or should I put on my no-match-swag-mask like that popular meme- Follow me for more recipes!

Cook Noob presents Tada. 

Okay, stove off! Kitchen Lights out! 

Ever been to Kolkata in June? Extremely tropical and humid especially if you are coming from the west. I was a west-ite for the last 2 years- Ahmedabad, Maharashtra, etc. so my sweat glands were shocked by the amount of fluid they were ordered to pump out to keep me alive! Post the 2-3 layovers in different airports, from my cantonment in Maharashtra to Kolkata (Indigo’s sexy 6E still haven’t landed there!) I remember the first thing I did was, gorged two plates of Chicken Momo along with a bowl of piping hot soup (a speciality of the East) and a hot cup of “Bharer” Cha! A tribute to my God for the safe journey- Food is my religion. Remember? And besides, Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Nothing great was ever achieved without...” and I always conclude Food, to discourage my enthusiastic Waldo, and George Elliot put her +1 with “No man can be wise on an empty stomach”. 

So, with a paunch full of momos and a head full of dreams I filled an admission form- short and crisp, just basics- PGPDS Program at Praxis Business School and had my interview scheduled in 3 days; I was fortunate, they were closing. Perpetually late! If classes started at 10, I reached… never mind! 

Being the Director of the institute, Praxis Business School, with years of expertise in corporate, an alum of IIT-K and an MBA grad from Iowa, I expected this man to be a scary old guy very much into the nitty-gritty of data science, but to my contrary, the meeting went quite well and revolved principally around my enthusiasm for data science and clarity of thought, and was unlike few interviews I earlier confronted, in one I was even told me to sketch. Perhaps someday I will understand why! Anyway, the interview went satisfactory, and I got the offer. And Mario get ready for the bumpy ride starting July’19! 

Fast forward to 15th July ’19 minus a few days!

My first visit to the campus wasn’t balmy. Although the directions appeared pretty straightforward, I didn’t appreciate the location, a crowded ride to the countryside crossing a district border and after dissipating litres of petroleum and sweat and refuelling with some soda pop and Cola, I finally arrived the data centre. The campus was admirable, full of...later, take me to an A.C. room! 

Post interaction with the then-current student- a sober guy, fur off, decked up for his placements! - I felt maybe I can learn something unique from this place.  

Chapter: Professionals- The pursuit of Knowledge!

Row 1 with four strangers staring at the whiteboard full of vector-gymnastics-bending and stretching themselves, coached by transformation matrices. That folk is Linear algebra 101!   

Marketing classes seemed sensible- talking about brands, advertisements, movie stars, etc. Kudos to our beloved PD sir!

Big brother was usually scheduled post-lunch- and battling hypothesis with CLT, riding a normal-curve-sauras was exhausting. Occasionally zombie apocalypse would happen- What is a ‘p-value’? – And I am now convinced zombies feed on the brain and these marching deads, surprisingly do exist! But unless you make BAYES your BAE, Data modelling will be “...like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital”( -Aaron Levenstein.)

The concept of alumni is fuzzily established for the PGPDS, reminds of quantum mechanics- they are there and not there at the same instant of time, cons of a 9 months’ course- before you bond they leave, so 35 fortunate helping family was encouraged to support each other in demystifying the “the practice or science of collecting and analyzing numerical data in large quantities, especially for the purpose of inferring proportions in a whole from those in a representative sample.”- 'Statistics'!

Although I was not that into sports and other cultural events, quoting a from 1 of 35 unique experiences: 

“But the journey was not confined in the four walls; nose in the books- we were encouraged to take parts in various sports and cultural activities as well. Such breaks were really necessary as these helped us to refresh our mind and improve our interpersonal skills. Along with Data Science, Praxis gave me the opportunity to learn volley ball and table tennis!”

In Zoology class, we learned about the anatomy of Python, Anaconda and Spider sitting here and there on our laptops. Dissecting everything and post a comprehensive investigation, we budding scientists came to two important conclusions:

• “In Stack Overflow we trust, all others can fuck off.”
• And,

Another outcome that remained in the draft: Keep your Facebook and WhatsApp tab open while you code or otherwise. It helps in de-concentrating! 

No denying most of, 'what is your name', recognized me initially as the ‘IIM A wala banda’ which, to be very honest, I never really appreciated that but very soon the image changed to the guy who smokes in every possible break! Bad habit. Smoking is injurious to health. My detox is on.  

RDBMS taught us one important lesson in life is

And I recollect GROUP BY, JOIN- OUTER, INNER,... forgot!

Godspeed "these days off"!

One thing which I will never deny, when I arrived here, post few months of corporate exposure I was pretty clear what I want from this place- knowledge and a better job but sometimes high accuracy on training data is a bad thing if your model, end of the day, under-preforms on an unseen dataset- my predictive model failed. I overfitted my life and, to my contrary, this place gave me a bunch of surprisingly good friends and food for nostalgia which I will always treasure and ‘the girl next door’. 

Confused? - that’s the first few sessions of Machine Learning for you. Mathematics, statistics, and coding in machine learning are like triangular slices of a round pizza served in a square box with some extra topping of irregular ‘domain knowledge’. But fortunately starting from vector aerobics to rocket science of transferring vectors homeward to vectors space ( Sonu Sood?), to finding the correct number of branches to be pruned in a random forest( Assam’s Tikok coal mining project guys perhaps needs some ML sessions. Read), to boosting the data-imbalance-immunity of your model with XGBoost, everything was explained keeping in mind the need of the industry. I enjoyed ML throughout, and the grades treated me well too. Thank you Subhashis Sir.

Would my journey be that fun to read (if at all!) if I occasionally spoke about R^2 or advised you not to tune the learning parameter of XGBoost first as it takes more time or tried explaining how in Classical CLT the sample averages are dependent on the 'law of large numbers' for its convergence in probability, almost to the expected value? Not so likely!

From Forbes to Walt Disney, from the top recruiters on LinkedIn to Sheryl Sandberg all agree storytelling is the cornerstone of human existence and should be cultivated. Human understands number, but feel stories, this rational animal still talks, reflects, and dreams in stories.  

What I learned from my alma maters and personal experience, the former having a substantial influence on my life, is that we have passed the age of up-skilling in one particular skill and plunged into the era of interdisciplinary studies (data science being one), where heterogeneity of experience is highly appreciated. And this is not new. Take the Renaissance for example  - Leonardo Da Vinci (commonly known as Da Vinci) though is mostly recognized for his outstanding works of art like Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, etc. but his achievements in several other fields like Physics, Biology, etc. are also significant ) and we are breathing in the Renaissance of Data! 

Master the Science and communicate the Arts- that's my take from this chapter of my life! And definitely binge-watch Netflix's DARK, Season 1 and 2, before 27th June '20!

Up next: Chapter: Placements: The Saga. 

"The end is just the beginning!"