Meet Paras, an aspiring data scientist learning from Mumbai. See how he used hands-on projects and exercises from his courses to build in-demand skills and accelerate his data career. In his own words, here’s his story.
I started taking courses on Coursera because I wanted to gain practical skills and apply them to what I’ve been learning. Since there was a lot of interest around data and conversations about its applications over the last few years, I decided to start by enrolling in the Big Data Specialization from the University of California, San Diego. Taking these courses has been amazing.The most exciting part was getting to complete hands-on assignments using industry-relevant tools. These assignments not only helped me gain practical knowledge but also gain confidence that I’d be able to apply what I was learning on the job.
Completing this Specialization helped me quickly accelerate my data analysis career. Now I’m able to:
- Ask the right questions about data
- Do basic exploration of large, complex datasets
- Effectively use Splunk for querying data
- Build decision trees on Knime for training and predicting data models
I also gained a broad overview of graph analytics along with some new ways to model, store, retrieve, and analyze graph-structured data. All of it was more than enough for me to land a data analyst role at a big multinational corporation.
Next, I want to get better at problem-solving, communication, and decision making. On the technical front, I am gearing up to learn more about Python, machine learning, and data visualization so that I can eventually move toward a data scientist role. I know it’s going to be a long journey from here, but with Coursera at my disposal, I’m confident that I’m going to make it through with flying colors.
