PGDBA Course Feedback- Gautam, 2015-17- Part 1

Given below is the PGDBA course feedback of Gautam, a pass-out of the first batch of this course. He completed this course in the year 2017 and given the chance, chose to share his experience in complete detail. Below is the first part of his PGDBA course feedback where he talks about his journey prior to and during the course.

Thanks for visiting this page and looking at my experience of doing the most sought-after analytics course in the country. I have split my entire experience into two posts. The first post talks about my background, rationale for choosing the program and my experience during the program. The second post covers how I feel this course has helped me in shaping my professional career after graduating from the course.

I must say that I have had my challenges during the course of this program. Since I already had professional experience of around six and a half years post my under-graduation, I joined this course with a bucket full of expectations. After completing my BE in Information Science and Engineering from RVCE, Bangalore, in 2008, I entered the most sought-after field at that time- IT. Prior to joining PGDBA, I had already worked with 3 companies, predominantly as a software engineer and had spent good amount of my career in South Africa.

I was doing good in my profession and was well settled, along with my wife, in South Africa. I had always dreamt of getting a master’s degree from one of the top institutes of India or the US. And, to give the necessary push to my dream, came this course – PGDBA started by the top three universities in India – IIM Calcutta, ISI Kolkata, and IIT Kharagpur. I had already developed an interest in the field of analytics and data science, owing to certain projects that I did at my personal end.

I applied for the program and in June 2015, I was sitting in a beautiful Joka campus – IIM Calcutta. The course looked very promising and I had high hopes from the course. Even though a lot of my colleagues did not agree with my decision to leave a well-settled, cushy job and go back to academics.

The outlook of the PGDBA staff was very dynamic and promising. I felt proud to be at JOKA IIMC. Green large campus, excellent professors and extremely high caliber classmates were some of the high points of my experience. I was among the eldest and had the maximum experience in the class.

The first semester at ISI Kolkata started in the later part of July 2015. We had world-class professors at ISI Kolkata. Foundation of statistics, computing in data science, statistical inference, stochastic processes, Database management were the subjects. The content was really good, and rigorous.

Computation in data science was the highlight of this semester. The professor teaching the course was extremely knowledgeable, friendly and rigorous in his approach. He not only talked about the rigorous theories of Linear algebra and machine learning but also gave us enough overview of the latest competitions and research going in the field of AI. He encouraged coding in the class on our laptops and we were implementing everything he was teaching in R/Python.

Other professors also gave a lot of practical examples in the class on the use of statistics to solve business problems. The course, Statistical Structures in Data was extremely rigorous and theoretical. Lots and lots of complex derivations were discussed and done thoroughly in the class. I was really feeling happy and satisfied with the academic rigor. One area that I felt was lacking was the focus on Big Data tools and technologies such as AWS, Hadoop, Spark, etc. 

Our second semester at IIT Kharagpur started in January 2016. Algorithms, Machine learning, Data Science laboratory, Linear regression and time series analysis were discussed rigorously and thoroughly. I was happy with the content and pace of the courses. 

By this time, our placement activities had also started. Since mine was the first batch, we had to create everything from scratch – process for selecting placement representatives, reaching out to companies, drafting policies, among other tasks. Among all this, there was a change in the command at the IIM Calcutta PGDBA office. The PGDBA chairperson at IIM Calcutta was changed during this time.

I was a little apprehensive about how things will unfold in due course of time. Nevertheless, we formed our placement committee and the committee started working towards their goal. Initially, I had thought that we would be allowed to participate in placements along with other students of three students (this was mentioned in the course brochure we had received at the time of admission). However, nothing of that sort happened at that time and we were on our own. 

Our placement committee had to build everything from scratch and had to compete against the existing courses of the colleges to get our batch placed.

Then came the third Semester at IIM C. This was full of activities and consisted of a lot of business fundamental courses. Though it was a very hectic semester and I used to sleep around 4 AM in the morning due to assignment/case studies submission, I enjoyed the course and the life in that semester completely. Courses were going fine but, placement discussions started heating up as it progressed.

Support from the institutes for placement efforts was not as what I had expected. I had thought that most of the things would be college driven; however, in our case, they were driven by students. Nevertheless, our entire batch worked together, and our placement committee put in extra effort in making sure that students got good internships. They owned the efforts, worked tirelessly, and ensured that all of us were placed on the first day for our internship. Offers were raining on the day of internship placement. The whole batch celebrated our internship placements.

My internship began in Gurgaon at CEB, which is a Gartner company now. I was treated extremely well as a research intern, had a stipend of 75K INR per month. I worked on the extraction of data from social media sources like Twitter, Facebook, and other sources like RSS Feeds and SEC filings data. They analyzed the data using text analytics techniques like topic modeling, sentiment analysis, text classification, etc.  I was fortunate to have a good boss and a good knowledgeable mentor during my internship. I must say I learned a lot during the internship.

My mentor and boss were happy with the way my work was shaping up, as I was putting a lot of effort. Finding business use cases of machine learning/NLP models is an extremely difficult task and only a few companies are good with it. Unfortunately, I could not get a PPO because the company didn’t have a concrete analytics strategy at that time and hence, they did not have an adequate budget to hire permanent staff.  So, I went back to campus for final placements.

There were around 26 people who were participating in final placements. 25 had already received PPOs from their companies. There were around 19 companies this time participating in the final placements for the batch. The hiring, this time was slower than internship placements, interviews were lengthier and offers were not raining as they were during the internship.

It was a tough day for me, and I was losing confidence after getting rejected at 3 interviews. Finally, I got placed in LnT Construction, Chennai as Manager (Analytics). Sadly, there were around 5 students in the batch who couldn’t bag a placement offer on that day. However, the placement team, batchmates, and college supported them in finding the right job and they were able to secure a good job soon after.

If I were to look completely from the financial perspective, PGDBA did not turn out to be a very successful decision for me. However, I had learnt a lot in these two years and I became much more knowledgeable. Though in the short-term, it wasn’t a financially beneficial decision and I had burnt all my savings, in the long-term it helped in becoming a more knowledgeable person and take the required step in the emerging field of analytics and data science. In my opinion, the course provided a good return on investment to those candidates who were either freshers or had around 2-3 years of work experience.

About Gautam-

A graduate of the batch 2015-17, Gautam works as a Senior Data Scientist with Daimler Trucks Asia, Tokyo, Japan. You can get in touch with him through his Linkedin profile.

If you need further guidance about the course and/or the admission procedure, etc., quickly write to us info@aimonks.com or visit AI Monks.

Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed in this post are solely of the author. Neither do these views reflect the opinion of AI Monks now do they bear any responsibility on AI Monks.