- I have always been an orator, that's perhaps why mentoring came naturally to me
- Hi! I am Rakshit Vig, a Data Science & Analytics professional and currently a Data mentor who has taught around 23000+ students in live workshops with more than 1000 students in personal training
- This is the story of how I ended up falling in love with Data science and became a Data mentor
Making sense of my ambitions
I started my schooling at St Claire’s Sr. Sec. school, in Agra. That’s where I was born. Right from the beginning, I was very involved in extracurriculars. Dancing was one of my favorites, followed by Oratory. That’s perhaps where I got my sense of theatrics from!
Although I wasn’t much of an academic, I never really let that get me down.
When I was near the end of my schooling, it was a period when everyone just wanted to become an engineer. The peer pressure was brutal back then.
So I decided to go with the flow. After my 10th, I gave two years to my JEE mains preparation. However, time went on quickly, and in the end, I wasn’t able to pull a good enough rank. But the worst of all was that I had also managed to somehow screw up my 12th.
But my goal was pretty clear, to be an engineer. (because that’s what everyone’s dream was at the time) So I dropped out another year and rented out a room 10km away from my home, to improve my 12th score and have another shot at JEE.
Fortunately, I improved my 12th score this time. Unfortunately, the JEE score still seemed to be as pathetic as ever.
At this point, I had repeated my 12th, became a renter in my own hometown, and was still unable to get a satisfactory JEE rank.
And I couldn’t have felt more pathetic about it. Only if I knew at the time, that my real strength didn’t lie in academics.
My strength was learning in the field, in practical situations.
And I was soon to find that out.
On the path to finding my passion
After finally completing my schooling, in 2014, I enrolled in VIT, Vellore, and got Electronics and communication as my branch. (Since my rank wasn't good enough, I could not get Computer science which was my first option).
Although I wasn’t someone who was super into academics, I WAS super into extra-curricular.
(During my college, I failed in 3 different subjects, since I still almost had no interest in academics).
Did a lot of oration in college, but I was most passionate about robotics and embedded systems.
But most importantly, I became the vice-captain of SEDS(Student for the exploration and development of space).
In 2016, our society SEDS was invited to the US for the CANSAT which is one of the biggest competitions in the world for space enthusiasts. Our team couldn’t find a place in the top ranks then.
But then the next year in 2017, when we went back there, we were able to bag the 2nd position and were even featured for it by The TOI. (feature)
Somewhere along these lines, I was developing my communication and oration skills, skills that were going to help me tremendously in my future roles!
Then in 2018, which was my final year, I also published a research report on the ‘Autonomous Book sorter system’.
Gradually, I bagged a role in PWC as a consultant. That marked the end of my college life but it was also the start of my long bond with the Data industry.
Falling in love with the way data transformed businesses
Joining PWC as a consultant was perhaps the best thing to have happened to my career! Because of the major fact, that the work was dynamic, challenging, and ALWAYS kept me on my toes.
My work hours were gruesome, and the stress was overburdening, but it was all worth it! Because it taught me much about how businesses operate and how they can be leveraged.
One of my most important clients while working with PWC was Pepsico!
During my work with PepsiCo, I was responsible for building strategies, leveraging ways to bring business, and contributing to overall development.
I dived into Data Analytics practice and got to work in close association with Data technologies like PowerBI, Tableau, SQL, and Python.
At the time, I was responsible for building end-to-end data analytics solutions for my clients.
Right from extracting data from various sources such as Pepsico’s cloud databases, website traffic, analytics, CRMs, etc. to making detailed data-driven solutions and analytics on how the company should implement decisions to leverage its metrics.
This process was fine-tuned and this was how data-driven decisions were taken to drive company growth.
Around this time, when I was working with PWC, I was also giving out tuition in parallel to my full-time job. It was more of a passion than a need for money for me because I have always wanted to become someone who could educate future generations.
In fact, I have always believed that if I hadn’t gone the corporate way, I would have been a college professor😅
In any case, giving out those tuitions brought out the mentor in me. On many levels it made me realize that somewhere, I had a penchant for teaching and it was something that I just always wanted to pursue!
Putting my Oratory and mentorship skills to the test
It was in around March 2022, that I finally decided to take a step toward my teaching passion. I had left PWC by then and had joined another more Data-centric company.
Later, in around I was contacted by one of my friends who was heading a pan-India Edtech, and he offered to share my experiences and learnings with students across India.
Of course, I was a bit apprehensive at first about the opportunity. But I knew this was my calling. I knew that I wanted to teach students what I knew about business and data. And this was my opportunity to do so.
In college, and in my job, I had done a lot of oratory and presentations so I knew I was up for the task.
All I needed was a kickstart. And with Jobaaj learnings, that’s exactly what I got!
I started mentoring students online with live actionable workshops on how to use data to drive business.
And on the very first workshop, the response I got was overwhelming. Even for me personally, I felt like I had finally found a place where I belonged. A profession where I could actually make a difference in people’s lives.
Till now, I have trained 20,000+ students online and personally oversee the data training of almost a thousand students.
Most recently, I have unlocked the achievement of having almost 1000 students live in my workshop. I feel like that’s one of the best achievements I have ever unlocked.
Many of my students have gone on to crack big companies and prominent data roles and I get so so proud of them in these times.
A day in the life of a Data professional
Currently, I live a double life. A data professional on the weekdays and a data mentor on the weekend. And it’s like living the best of both worlds.
As a data professional, I am able to share my personal corporate experiences with my students thus making them ready for the challenges that they might face in their jobs.
For example, currently, I am working on the data of a customer’s journey through the client’s website.
In that, I need to track data and extract it from various points of contact from the website. Based on how the user interacts with the website, clicks on a button, or downloads a resource, the company would like to determine how to best retarget the user or improve the user experience.
So as a data professional, my role would be to analyze all this data and extract insights on how the company should reoptimize its website’s user experience. I would then present these findings to the company along with the benefits they would get from implementing these.
So a major part of my work day as a Data professional involves communicating with the different teams including tech, marketing, and sales, generating insights and data from these communications, and then analyzing all this data and presenting my findings back to my team manager.
The time duration needed to do all of these varies considerably. Sometimes, the whole process right from data extraction to insight presentation involves a week. For some problem statements though, the process could take months.
How can YOU start a career in Data Analytics?
Let me go all out by first saying that Data Analysis in itself is a very vast field. It involves everything from mathematics, and statistics, to programming, and database handling.
So if you are someone who is looking out to start a career in Data Analytics, you must first create a personalized career roadmap for yourself.
For example, if you are from a tech background, then your first priority would be to understand the mathematics and statistics behind the data, and if you are from a financial background, then you would need to aim to learn programming fundamentals, SQL, data visualization, data literacy, etc.
I will tell you one thing though. Doesn’t matter which field you are from, Excel SHOULD ALWAYS be your first step in the journey.
If you can learn how to manipulate large quantities of data perfectly on Excel, then that is your queue to move on to the next steps of your Data journey!
As a Data professional and as a mentor, I am always ready to help students get started on their own Data careers!
So if you have any questions or confusion regarding your career in Data, feel free to hit me up at my Linkedin and I will try my best to solve those problems for you!😇
PS: Also I hold weekly FREE workshops on Data Analytics where I demonstrate how to build a Data analysis product right from scratch!
Feel free to join! Register here.
Thanks for Reading!
