My journey to becoming one of the cool kids
By: Laasya Kanuru
Tags: Data Science, Careers, Data Analytics, Journey

My journey to becoming one of the cool kids

If you were in high school in 2014, you know that the popular kids played sports, had a ton of friends and made school uniforms look like a New York Fashion Week ensemble. And if you were anything like me, you tried everything (and failed) to be one of them. Yet here I am, 7 years later, and the most popular kid in my school said “woah that’s cool” when I told them about my job!

Introspection during college

It was around the beginning of my 2nd year of college when the words “Machine Learning” and “Data Science” were murmured by the popular kids of the Computer Science department. Now, I would like to say that I was one of the first people in my college to research these subjects and start planning a career in this new field. But that would be an absolute lie. I watched as all my peers struggled with complex predictive algorithms and laughed at them while I comfortably learnt HTML, read Robert Ludlum books and binge watched Suits.

However, when a mandatory internship was due in my 3rd year, I decided that it had to be in machine learning. Not because I was passionate about it or anything, but because my mom (god bless her intuition) thought I’d like it. While the reason I started working with data is embarrassing, I couldn’t be more happy with the outcome. I finally saw what everyone else saw in this field. I soon managed to take all the data centric classes at university, scored an ML internship at IIT Bombay (IIT BOMBAY!!!!) and it was through this internship that I met Mike, the CEO of Commutatus.

You know when the name of a specific person is mentioned like that, they’re going to be pretty important moving forward.

Getting employed in this economy

While working with Mike on a project that IITB and Commutatus were collaborating on, I stalked his company online, as one does. Commutatus’ website radiated a fun work culture and the projects they worked on seemed extremely impressive. But, they had absolutely no mention of Data Science or anything around that field. A couple of months later, I was still hung up on this company (just from following them online) so I took a leap of faith and contacted Mike about a job.

As luck turns out (and it was incredible luck at that), Mike was looking to start a Data Science division at Commutatus and already had a few projects in mind. A couple of interviews later, I was their first completely remote hire. Oh also more importantly, I was their first Data Science engineer!

Pursuing Data Science at Commutatus

When I mention that I work in data science to my relatives, this is what they picture:

But since we’re being honest here, it’s more like-

Ok I lied again, this is what it’s really like-

But it’s still the coolest job I could ever imagine myself doing. Brace yourself, we’re about to get a tad technical now. My job primarily consists of three areas-

1. Data Engineering

2. Data Science

3. Data Analytics

As a data engineer, I develop data pipelines and design software architectures to process data. I go through all the phases of Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) either for future analysis or just to store the client’s data in a more structured manner.

Here’s the ETL workflow I designed for Educatly. We used AWS S3 and Glue in this architecture-

Data Ingestion Architecture

The Data Science portion of the job is building predictive models to incorporate customized suggestions for users who visit the clients’ platforms. We use machine learning algorithms on preprocessed data for this. Here’s the basic workflow for a recommendation engine developed for AIESEC-

AIESEC Recommendation Engine Architecture

Data Analytics, as its name suggests is basically analyzing historical data of the client to help them make more informed decisions for their businesses. It involves coming up with the business metrics that need to be tracked, followed by data engineering and concluding with data visualization through charts and dashboards. I’ve designed insightful Sales analytics dashboards for Gehna and MyCaptain to help them monitor their sales and overall platform activity tracking dashboards for Mentormind and Civis.

This experience for the past year has been more rewarding than 16 years of formal education. Every project contributes to my learning curve and a major portion of the work involves trying something new for a client and implementing this for other clients keen on making their businesses more data driven.

With the help of colleagues who are willing to help at any time of the day and a mentor who pretty much has a solution (or guides me towards finding a solution) for any problem I face, it’s been a great ride. Experimenting with data is fascinating because the number of ideas that a new perspective on the data being stored by companies generates is endless. And since we are constantly trying to use the most fancy tech stacks for our projects no matter how daunting they can seem at the start (*slyly shoots a glance at AWS*), it never gets repetitive.

A wholesome first year at Commutatus

Overall, corporate life has been nothing like my peers and older cousins who work at famous tech companies have complained about. I love my job, I’ve been able to make time to not only continue my passions outside of work but also restart abandoned projects and most surprising of all, I started voluntarily reading business and management books!

definitely ironical use of the peace sign

Anyway, to come clean before I wrap this up, I never really showed off to that popular kid from school. But in my head, I laugh at everyone who says “Oh no, it’s Monday again” because ha! couldn’t be me, I’ve been waiting for Monday! Who’s the cool kid now