My journey with ScholarX 2020

What is ScholarX?

ScholarX is an exclusive 6-month program conducted by Sustainable Education Foundation (SEF) which provide free premium mentoring support to a selected pool of Sri Lankan undergraduate students. There are about 18 mentors who are currently engaged in one of the world’s top universities or Fortune 500 companies.

For more information, visit https://sefglobal.org/scholarx/2020/

I am a second-year Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering undergraduate from the University of Moratuwa. I got to know about ScholarX from Kithmini Herath, who was a mentee of this program in the previous year. I have always been interested in Machine Learning and Data Science. I wanted to know more about these fields and wanted someone to guide me towards the right path to achieve my goals. So I decided to apply to the program and to my surprise, I was selected for the program to be a mentee under Mr Isuru Daulagala !!!

My mentor, Mr Isuru Daulagala is currently a Software Engineer at NVIDIA and has a background in Electronic Design Automation, Optimizing Machine Learning Algorithms and Reinforcement Learning.

Mentoring Sessions …

Our first meeting was an introductory session and he asked me about my interests and what I wanted to gain from this program. During our discussion, I learnt the importance of data structures and algorithms, improving my coding skills and he advised me to read and try to understand research papers related to my area of interest. He encouraged me to participate in competitions related to machine learning and suggested working on a project together to improve my experience and knowledge in these areas. Mentoring sessions are very friendly and helped me to learn new, interesting things.

I would like to thank Sustainable Education Foundation for initiating this program and giving us an opportunity to connect with industry experts and academics across the world!