What boosted my student career
How an association changed my long-term future.
I have to say, I don’t usually share personal experiences on the Internet, especially in the context of blog posts.
However, unusual times lead to unusual decisions, and everyone will agree with me that this year, with a pandemic cursing the entire world and a US ex-President shouting “WE WON THE ELECTION” despite the opposite outcome, turned out to be quite different from what I was expecting.
The year 2020 has also been the one in which PoliMi Data Scientists, the student association I am part of, became an official association of Politecnico di Milano. If it doesn’t seem much, I hope you will change your mind by the end of the blog post, because being part of it was one of the most impactful experiences of my career.
I am not overstating.
PMDS allowed me to grow much more than would have been possible with a “normal” student career.
I am hoping that by reading this blog post you will think about joining a Data Science association too.
Let’s start with a little bit of history.
How it started
The year was 2018, I was attending the Data Mining and Text Mining course when I saw four students going to the professor before the start of the lesson. I knew three of them and I knew they were particularly brilliant and passionate students, but I was completely oblivious of what they were going to talk about.
They were working under the hood for months to design a Data Science community in our university. This was the birth of PoliMi Data Scientists. Differently from many projects I have seen that had potential but never realized, they had already many events planned for the next months.
A meetup with TrueYou, a start-up that was applying image classification to dating apps. A talk from Empatica, a successful company that applies Machine Learning to epilepsy detection.
I wanted to join, but I was skeptical. The first year of the MSc was the hardest, full of particularly intense courses, while I was working as a web developer in my spare time to pay for my tuition.
But, at the same time, I was too often complaining about the courses being focused only on absorbing knowledge without the possibility to put it into practice.
This was the best shot for it and I knew that if I didn’t join them I would have regretted it later.
I decided to join PMDS and after only a couple of months the team was grown and the activities of the community were not only limited to events. We started releasing course notes, suggested study plans, blog posts (like the one you are reading), and, finally, the cherry on the top: the formalization from community to official association of Politecnico di Milano.
By this time a lot changed in the association, some of the initial people either graduated or moved to another country, new people arrived and I found myself being the person with the most responsibilities. So, the decision to candidate myself as President came naturally.
After the big news of the officialization, we were all pumped and ready to start 2020 with full expectations, but then the pandemic struck, and most of our plans about a big membership opening and a huge in-person Data Science competition were canceled.
Luckily we were able to move all our events online, even if that would mean losing all the opportunities given by the networking part after the talks, but it also allowed us to make them more accessible.
Fast-forward to today. I graduated and moved to Lausanne to start a Ph.D. in Computational Biology. Since I am not a student of Politecnico anymore, the role of President moved to Kai, a young student that will carry on the activities admirably, helped by the other talented members of the PMDS Team.
Even though I don’t have an official role on the board anymore, I am still participating in the activities of the association, and I think this to be the perfect time to think about all the ways in which being part of PMDS helped me to grow as a person, as a student, and as a researcher.
I gained in two years skills and experience that would have taken me years after graduation.
Let talk about those skills.
Public speaking
This can seem quite obvious, but if you think about it, how often do you talk in front of more than 10 people, with all attention focused only on you?
However, at some point in time, every one of us students will arrive on graduation day and show his/her best oratory skills. And it will not be finished there, you will likely have to do it for getting the position you strive for, at a conference, at a corporate meeting, at your best friend’s wedding.
No one can escape it!
I always struggled to be at the center of attention, and I still get nervous when it happens. But at the same time, I valued the importance of being, or better… learning to appear comfortable in that situation.
My first chance to speak in public with PMDS was at the end of an event with Moviri, and the only thing I had to say was “Thank you very much, here is the QR code for the survey. Enjoy the rest of the evening”. I was not supposed to talk during that event, but I purposely asked to do that because I wanted to have the opportunity to talk in public without much room for screwing up.
Despite the simplicity of what I had to say, I still noticed many, MANY things I should have done better: I was grasping the microphone with both the hands like a scared koala, I was not articulating words well and my posture was awful. But still, I managed to say the sentence and move on for the next chance to speak in public.
Given the understanding I gained from the previous experience I decided to step it up a little bit. We wanted to promote the events and the new course notes we wrote.
The most suitable courses for us in the first semester were Soft Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Recommender Systems, which happened to be some of the most followed courses. I started with RS, the smallest and most informal one and even though my speech was confused, my mouth was dry as sand, and my tone was too serious, it was actually not a bad presentation. Then I moved to AI and finally SC, with more than 200 people listening only to me.
I could see that it was becoming easier from the first to the last talk, and I could focus less on what to say and more on my posture, my movement across the room, and the pauses after the important sentences.
This training turned out to be very useful in many situations. For example, during one of our thesis proposal events, 15 minutes before the start of my thesis supervisor, he came to me and said:
Why don’t you present 2–3 slides about the thesis you are working on, as an example of what we do?
That meant that in 15 + 10 minutes I had to prepare the slides about my janky results completely from scratch, rehearse them in my mind, go to the stage and present them as best as I could. Well, it is one of the presentations I am most proud of, both for the short amount of time I had to prepare it and for the nice talk I came up with.
Well, this section turned out to be way longer than expected, but I hope to have shown you that even if the first time it will not be a great experience, it will soon be useful and rewarding.
Writing
Not everyone likes writing. I do.
Around 90% of the things that I write are only for me. I built the habit of writing down every observation and ideas about my work of the PhD and beyond. This helps me in putting order to my ideas and to reconstruct the process that leads to a certain result.
But, most of all, I love writing the remaining 10% for other people to (hopefully) enjoy, from quite technical topics like “Reproducibility in Deep Learning” to more relaxed ones like “Visualization horrors in the age of COVID-19”.
Writing blog posts is something that not everyone must do if he/she is not interested, but at the same time is one of the most fruitful activities, for several reasons.
The first one is fairly obvious. If you are doing a PhD, you are likely going to write a lot, be it a paper, a review or a report. Practicing writing, even if with a different style, will speed you up and you will not struggle for hours on starting a single sentence. And maybe we will start to see around more papers with a more comprehensible blog-like style, instead of the cryptic style we see a lot nowadays.
The second one includes also those who are not interested in pursuing a PhD. Having a blog will show a commitment and an interest that not everyone has. Companies will surely notice this since it is something that you can mention in your CV. And if the recruiter will see a blog post about the topics they are hiring for, that will make them fall in love with you.
Even when I showed the first draft of this blog post, people told me that they have seen my writing skills improving over time so, apparently, it works :)
Networking
Networking is one more victim of COVID-19.
From last March we had to move all our events online and we thus lost an essential aspect of our meetings: the possibility to come in contact with many experienced people that crossed our same paths years before us.
They will not only give you valuable suggestions but may soon become collaborators or even colleagues.
Networking is a fundamental aspect of both the industrial and academic world.
During the last couple of years, we had the chance to meet so many people from companies like Microsoft, IBM, ENI, McKinsey, and the more I was used to coming in contact with them, the more I would unconsciously consider them as peers. This is very useful in your interactions during job interviews. I was confident both during the first exchanges of emails and during the interviews in person.
I realized the power of being confident during a conference I participated in a couple of months ago. Even though it was online, I had no problems going around the platform to speak with whoever I was interested to talk to.
I ended up exchanging many emails even after the conference ended and hopefully, some collaborations will develop from that.
Taking responsibilities
PMDS becoming an official association of Politecnico di Milano was one of the greatest but hardest things to do. Luckily I had many incredibly helpful people that helped me in juggling between the incomplete information available and the misty bureaucracy required to make an association certified by the Italian public administration.
In retrospect, it doesn’t look as scary as it was at the beginning, and I will surely do it again.
Being part of an association comes with many responsibilities, but nothing really daunting. For example, to integrate students who just joined the team, we usually pair them with someone who is not new in the organization of an event. After seeing that is actually not that hard, they soon want to be responsible for the next one!
Companies will fight to hire someone who has knowledge about Data Science but is also capable of cooperating with company representatives to set up the topic and date of the event, with the university to arrange the location, with the other team members to coordinate all the aspects, and with the participants for the promotion.
The CV
Let’s be pragmatic. Everything I wrote until now is a well-known aspect of being part of an association. Whoever is going to hire you in the future knows them as well and is interested in that.
I know that studying at University is already challenging, but this is the time to join this type of activity. If you are passionate and interested, you have nothing to lose. Since you are a student and you are here to learn, you will have no consequences if you mess up an introduction at the beginning of an event.
This is the period to make mistakes.
Having an active role in an association, especially if related to the field in which you want to work, will make you stand out from the others already at the beginning of the selection process.
And when you will meet the recruiters in person, you will be able to show that what you wrote in the CV was not just overstatements.
You will be a confident, eloquent, and competent candidate.
This is a blog post published by the PoliMi Data Scientists community. We are a student association of Politecnico di Milano that organizes events and write resources on Data Science and Machine Learning topics.
If you have suggestions or you want to come in contact with us, you can write to us on our Facebook page.
