AlmaBetter, Week 2: T-minus-30 to Data Science Job
What is risk? A question that you should never ask either a philosopher or a Data Scientist. Especially not to a Data Scientist who is in the making, and I am guilty of being one myself. I hope it doesn’t come as a surprise, and certainly it won’t to the people who downplay the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, but I am guilty of being a human as well. With an experience spanning over two decades, I find it safe to define ‘risk’ in terms of human emotions. I would define ‘risk’ as:
The anxiety of possible failure and the thrill of plausible high reward, balancing each other on the scale of life.
Making it hard to choose one. But indecisiveness is far worse. Nobody remembers the men and women who couldn’t pick up the weapon to fight. History remembers risk-takers.
AlmaBetter has done everything in its power to de-risk education for students. AlmaBetter is making the glamour of a Data Science job more and more accessible for everyone. But even Superman has a Kryptonite and so does everything else. Signing an agreement with NBFC was not as deadly as a Kryptonite, but it was certainly a limitation of the process. The agreement had legal and financial jargon, which only a lawyer or a banker could comprehend in their true sense. However, my sense of risk and from where it was stemming from, evolved as I progressed through the application process. Initially, it seemed as if the sense of risk was stemming from the legal jargon. But as I investigated further, legal jargon was just one part from where the sense of risk was stemming from. The other and more important part was self-doubt. I was doubting my ability to complete the entire duration of Thirty Two weeks, with the program. I reflected upon the First week of the program. I couldn’t remember it as a ‘week’. I never felt a week passing by. The reason for that was, I wasn’t focused on getting through the ‘week’. My focus was on completing tasks on a daily basis and scoring on the daily quizzes so that my rank, amongst my batch could improve. I realized that it wasn’t about putting up a large chunk of effort over a period of Thirty Two weeks. It was about putting up a small chunk of efforts on every single day. Instead of looking at a journey of a million miles, I could see how focusing narrowly on the next step ahead might be fruitful. Introspection boosted my confidence, though the sense of risk associated with the legal jargon, remained. But it was much smaller in comparison and I decided to move forward to the battle station.
Hhighlight of the week was the mentorship session. AlmaBetter, from what I experienced till now, is focusing upon building an interview-slaying machine. A well-oiled machine, adept with domain expertise and with people skills. Domain knowledge is being built into the system through live lectures, group discussions and other activities. Mentorship sessions with industry experts with over a decade of experience, is what takes care of people skills. Knowing something is as essential as communicating what you know. Mentorship sessions, help us to learn how to communicate our knowledge. Not just that, the experts share with us valuable industry and interview insights to help our cause. The feedback system is as always robust and lets both mentor and mentee, reflect on the session.
The rest of the week was just as the last one, full of learning. The assignments this week were up in their difficulty level by a notch. It was fun, solving them. Most importantly, AlmaBetter has helped me to become punctual. This is all for now, I will be back to reflect on my week on next Sunday.
Hasta la vista.
(Not a Terminator reference)
