The joys of having no clue
…. JDBC …, …. ODBC…., … SPARK…., … KAFKA…., …. GSQL…., … GUI…
These were just some of the words repeatedly announced at the team meetings I’ve been a part of since January 2022 and in all honesty, they make less sense to me than an abracadabra, a bibbidi-bobbidi-boo or a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. I’ve never been the kind of girl who was innately inclined to tech or the coding or the gaming world but for many incredibly unrelated reasons (the money [I’m only joking]) I decided to pursue a master’s in Data Analytics.
When picking universities and courses I decided to do a bachelors in India, to explore the rich culture and heritage that I missed out on when I studied in the Middle East. Dubai hosts a heritage of its own and I am beyond grateful that I witnessed the lovely Arab hospitality for so many years, but I decided to shelf my privileged life and pursued my bachelors in the noisy and colourful streets of Bangalore. The food was incredible but did not persuade me into doing a predominantly coding master’s programme. During my triple major (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics) we were forced to take a module on coding in Python and in this class of 90 students, who would spend 25 hours (sometimes 27 hours) of the day studying, I was one of the few people who managed to successfully run the code: print (“Hello World!”)
And that was it. My eureka moment; this is when I decided to do a course that would give me the platform to develop my “new skill”. To all the tech readers, I apologize for thinking Python coding on Jupyter Notebooks was the hardest thing in the world; I now know about Spyder, R, C, C++ and all the others that make Python a piece of cake. I moved to halls in September 2021 and now live with 6 other students who study AI based courses that are equally hard if not harder than my MSc Data Analytics course. Queen Mary hosts a plethora of international students giving me the platform to interact with so many people — I made it my mission to find out as much information about as many people that my human brain could hold; kudos to LinkedIn and Instagram for supporting the process and recording my findings.
Whilst attempting to maintain an unrealistically active social life I also joined the graduate cycle application race. As an international student I moved to London expecting a saturated job market, but I was not prepared for the graduate scheme application-rejection cycle which lasted a lifetime or my first semester (reader’s choice). Mid-application cycle a few of us would meet on Wednesday afternoons at a pink (understatement) coffee shop near university (eventually called the office because of how often we met there for coffee; we actually have an office now with walls and no Italian music in the background). Some of the coffee troopers included Max (C.E.O of Pinboard, secret recruiter, possibly superhuman) and Naman (graph database consultant, software developer, enjoys a good meme and random YouTube shorts). Max, who worked at all the companies I applied to, would give us tips for job interviews and applications and by the end of 2021 I found myself having discussions with him about working at his own, new company: Pinboard Consulting.
Pinboard Consulting is a graph analytics (tech thing) consultancy that employed a not so tech native student to write documents and complete schema designs. I am currently celebrating over 8 weeks at the company, and I am so glad that I did not run away as soon as the men decided to name all the acronyms they know (mind you, I heard more tech words on my first day at work than I’ve heard my entire life!). My job title says Junior Business Analyst, I think it should be changed to Junior-Graph-Drax_the_Destroyer “Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too fast. I would catch it.” I hear the discussions at work and try to make sensible sentences with these phrases to impress my LinkedIn connections. Not a very useful skill since I still don’t fully understand what the sentences “return” (sneaked in a coding reference — proud moment). Fortunately, the boss hasn’t pushed me in to the deep developing world of GSQL coding, instead I get to do the more interesting bits of the business process like making presentations and writing up documents.
2022 has hosted several milestones, first day at work, first month at work, first version of a business requirements document, first presentation to the team, first schema specification and first hackathon (in progress). Over the next few weeks, my life will revolve around the work our team is doing for the TigerGraph Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge (and university because I still do that). Tune into the next few blogs for details about my first hackathon!!
