PGDBA – Course Feedback- Arjun Gupta, 2017-19

Arjun Gupta, one of the pass-outs of the 2017-19 batch shared his PGDBA – Course Feedback with AI Monks. Read below to know what the course meant to him and how it helped him learn and grow, both professionally and personally.

“Data is the new oil“- this phrase is on everyone’s lips these days. And why not, every company is using data to make a decision of any and every sort.

I did my engineering from Punjab Engineering College in 2014, post which I worked as a Business Analyst with a Market Research and Analytics firm called Evalueserve. I worked with Evalueserve for a couple of years and during the last year of my stint, I got working on the data. This is when I was fascinated with the huge scope of data and analytics.

I knew about the Business Analytics course at IIM Calcutta but I also knew that the intake number was very less. So, along with preparing for the PGDBA exam, I prepared for the general management exams as well. I got admission in this course as well as a few of the IIMs. How well the course is structured and how the world is moving towards data, made me choose this course over the courses from other established colleges.

The course is designed wonderfully. During the pre-semester in IIM Calcutta, we got introduced to some of the important management subjects including Finance, Marketing, Operations, etc. as well as to the application and scope of Analytics. The first semester was in ISI. The subjects ranged from stats heavy subjects like Statistical Structures in Data, Inference, to coding intensive subjects like Computation in Data Science and DBMS (Database Management). Overall, the level of faculty and the course content made this semester a great learning experience for everyone in terms of building the foundation for analytics.

The second semester in IIT Kharagpur was hectic but provided us with immense learning. Subjects like Time Series, Machine Learning, Supply Chain analytics, etc. as well as hands-on experience in the labs helped us solve the data aspect of the business problems. The business aspect is what was being taught in the third semester in IIM Calcutta. We had management subjects like Computational Finance, Marketing Management, Project Management, etc. as well as the analytics specific subjects like Predictive Modeling, Categorical Data Analysis, etc.

The most unique proposition of this course is the 6-month-long internship. Companies like Amazon, Barclays, DE Shaw, Mastercard, Flipkart, etc. participated in our internship process on one of the days in August. I got my internship offer from Amazon as a Capacity Optimization Analyst.

In Amazon, I led a project to standardize the generation of schedules for Customer Service Agents across all the Amazon sites around the world. During the final placements, I got an offer from Mitsubishi in its analytics division in Japan. But as fate had it, I got another offer from a fashion startup called Zilingo. It’s a unicorn startup making the fashion supply chain efficient. I joined Zilingo in June as a Senior Project Manager in their Business Intelligence and Data Analytics team.

For anyone who is looking to do a business analytics course in India, I think PGDBA is definitely a good option to consider. The course curriculum is designed in a way to help you boost your career not only in data sciences but can also help you become a bridge between the tech and the business teams. This is the need for companies to realize this – which is the main reason this course has gotten such traction in such a brief time.