A New Chapter with My Mentor - ScholarX
Hi Everyone,
It was during the semester two holidays, I noticed some of my friends were writing up amazing articles and blogs, which made me curious. Honestly, I didn't know about what a blog is and platforms such as medium etc. The term ScholarX was introduced to me through those articles and by my colleagues, who told me about this mentoring program. During the period of first ScholarX program, I saw a great improvement in my colleagues, in terms of knowledge about new technologies, industry and academia. This made me curious to apply for ScholarX program. Let me share some of my colleagues’ articles, which you might be interested to read.
I was really excited of being selected for the ScholarX 2020 program and becoming a mentee assigned to Dr. Rukshan Batuwita, who is a Data Scientist at Google and has a PhD in Applied Machine Learning from the University of Oxford, added cream to my joy. My excitation triggered me to contact my mentor without any delay to begin our journey. We had our individual introductory session, where I realized that he is an encyclopedia of Data Science, which made me responsible to value his time and gain maximum knowledge and valuable advises from him. Afterwards we had another session which is an interesting group mentoring session, where I was able to gain a lot through the questions asked by my peers and valuable mentoring given by Dr. Rukshan Batuwita. I hope to share the valuable advices, knowledge we gained from Dr. Rukshan Batuwita and our experience in this journey through a series of articles.
Importance of Statistics in Data Science
One of the key advices given by Dr Rukshan is to have a good foundation in statistics to boost our career in Data Science. Because Data Science includes using samples from a population and make prediction on populations. Statistical concepts like probability distribution, confidence intervals, Bayesian statistics, over and under sampling, and dimensionality reduction plays an important role in Data Science. Additionally, he suggested us to follow mathematics modules related to statistics in the university or online courses and reading good books on it.
Foundation in Machine Learning
A strong foundation is the ladder to ensure the future to adapt and thrive in our career. He advised us to follow good foundation courses in machine learning, which gives more insights about the mathematical concepts used in machine learning such as gradient descent, regression, decision trees, etc. Machine learning course and deep learning specialization provided by Andrew Ng in Coursera are the foundation courses highly suggested by Dr. Rukshan. The links for those courses as follows:
- Machine Learning, by Andrew Ng, https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning
- Deep Learning specialization, by Deep learning.ai, https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep-learning?
Guide to a Path in Academics
In the era of rapid advancement of technologies many undergraduates are confused in whether to follow a path in academics or to join the industry. Also, we are confused with what we should be doing during our undergraduate period. Are we supposed to do more industry related projects to gain more hands-on experience? or polish our fundamentals? This was a question raised by my colleague Amaya, which is crucial for undergraduates.
Dr. Rukshan suggested us to spend more time in polishing our fundamentals during the undergraduate period, if we want to pursue a career in academia. Technologies will rapidly change during the period of our academics (from undergraduates to PhD), but a strong knowledge in fundamentals will help us survive this evolution. He also suggested us to do more reading to get updated about current trends in the technology. When it comes to applying for PhD, he advised us to maintain high GPA and to do good researches during the undergraduate period. These factors will be supportive for us to get a good scholarship to pursue higher studies.
We were able to gain a lot through our group conversation with Dr.Rukshan. I hope that this article would have given you some good insights and hope to share more valuables insights we gain from our mentor in the upcoming articles.
If you have any questions or feedback related to this article, please do list them below!