Journey this far — Bertelsmann Udacity Data Science Scholarship
So,someone from my college’s Developers’ Group on Whatsapp posted about this Scholarship and I filled the application form asap.
May 2, 2018, 9:45 PM: Received a mail-
“Congratulations!
Dear Reshu,
We’re very happy to offer you a Bertelsmann Data Science Challenge Scholarship. We received applications from many talented and motivated candidates, but yours truly stood out.”
May 8th, 2018: The official day to begin with the coursework. Got the mail to join the slack channel.
Slack and me were not fitting in—
Ohh yes! On initial weeks I found slack so intimidating. Maybe these were initial stage days leading to too much of traffic and also I was not aware of the working of the slack-culture.
Some weeks later…
There was a general announcement regarding positions of SLs aka Student Leaders. Actually someone pinged me to vote for him to be SL for some channels. I thought maybe I should give a try for myself too. And to my surprise, I got selected for SL role for #women_who_code channel. This is what happened best to me in this coursework.I got in touch with other SLs of the channel and have been organising so many good engaging+learning activities for women to encourage more of their participation. @Gasia Atashian, purva nahar , Jéssica Happatsch and we recently have started doing mid-night sessions on hangouts chat for smooth implementation of our initiatives. Lol! I seriously will miss our talks,agreements and disagreements. And now,Slack has become my new family.
We had been palnning to organise — Blog/Vlog Tutorial activity,Book Activity,Hackathons and Motivational sessions etc...Ahh! And we ceratinly have been able to achieve a good level of support and response from the channel. The team rocks!!
P.S.I look so weird here,never mind :D
I am regular on Online meetups organised by #delhi organisers and lately joined Virtual Study Group initiated by Kasthuri P . She encouraged me to present my basic projects for which I even gave a shoutout too and that got featured too luckily! Also I have few times attended Quiz session organised by Ursula Perez on https://kahoot.it/ (Kahoot Platform) which really helped me work on my shortcomings in Python and Statistics parts.Some really engaging doubt removal sessions via Skype,Hangouts helped me get my doubts get resolved.
Drawing inspiration from some who are already expert in this domain as data scientists and working under them makes you realize how exactly the things work. Like Gasia and Alina. They even share their interview tips and office issues etc. :)
What I really love about this coursework is community bonding. There are people from all over the globe,of different age groups, of different professions,of different life-styles,of different culture and we are all united via this course. And not to forget #meme channel,the constant support to pass through gloomy days!!
Also I am loving #30_days_of_data challenge initiated by Kathleen.Udacity. Working on projects with teammates and hoping to finish the course good way! Learning new methods and debugging ways to go with the code.
Virtual Code discussion sessions—
The course is divided into 3 basic categories- Statistics,Python,SQL. SQL was really new to me. Joined #SQL channel and shooted queries on discussion forum to get well acquainted with it.
Its rain of codes in India as raining as began and I am loving it. Whatever I feared about on 1st day of the challenge,are now becoming my best friends.No more I can expect from this opportunity,winning over my fears,whether it is that Slack-phobia or SQL-Phobia or hesitation to present my ideas and projects.
This is just the beginning. I’ll be trying my best to utilize the resource provided & share my knowledge with others. Thank you Udacity and Bertelsmann for giving us this opportunity. This couldn’t have been possible without YOU!
Some initiatives worth to be shared…
Keep yourself updated. Do support.
Medium publishing page:🗞️
https://medium.com/ub-women-data-scholarsYoutube channel:🎥
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrxso4uNQK4QmoVY6g0Gqqg
