My First Year at IITR as an EE major
by Aryan Gupta
Posted on Sunday, May 7, 2023
So why do you need to read this blog? Honestly I don’t know myself. I am just a sophomore in Electrical Engineering who found his way into a domain you may be talking about a lot these days i.e Data Science. I do feel like have way less experience according to the standard perception of the students, like I have not secured an internship or a job(on campus), nor I have won a global hackathon competition (we did win bronze medal in Inter IIT Tech Meet 11.0 Chandrayaan PS but it is far less accomplishment than many at IITR). So in this post, I want to cover the story of my recruitment to DSG, IITR and my experiences and learnings during this whole year.
So let me tell you something about what I did during the past year. I completed various YouTube courses( like the famous Andrew Ng's ML course), read a million blogs, and tried through some state-of-the-art research papers(MIT-level shit). Also, I participated in various hackathons and coding events to enhance my skills during this period. From Shell.AI challenge (my first off-campus hackathon) to the Inter IIT tech meet, I feel like these hackathons have given me good exposure to the world of Software Development. These experiences also helped me appreciate the world of Open-Source, where I made a few contributions to be a part of the greater community.
Also, I participated in some internal events of DSG, which gave me a chance to interact with some of the greatest minds on campus, from people who are top in the class as well as in ML to the ones that have published papers in UG, who are great at management to some of the most creative people in IITR.
Kickstart
I gave JEE, got a bit lucky and then came into IITR. That is the most natural part in the life of an Indian student(can also say for international readers ;-)) and needs no details, so let's skip that. I came here and got overwhelmed by the campus environment. I was a shy guy (still I am) who lost all his social skills owing to the pandemic. On the top of that, I took some bad decisions. I isolated from the most stuff like WhatsApp messages as they were hard to read after online classes and focussed on the my general life like going to gym. I did not make any friends during this period and kind of lacked a 'social life' of the college as portrayed in the movies. But one good thing that I did was that I developed an interest for Python, still an important asset to me, during this period.
Then came the results, and I needed to get more CGPA for a branch change, as with most people. This wad a bit disappointing for me. This is kind of situation which make you believe you are not good enough, but trust me, there are much better things to do in college than just constantly being worried about a number, although no offense to my academic friends whom I am highly dependent on during exams. The period after the first semester was particularly productive, where I learned valuable things that proved helpful later on.
The First Few Lessons
So the first-semester break was exciting, with lots of intro talks and workshops owing to Cognizance. I had a good interest in following the first few events and club intro-talks, but by the end of two weeks, I had lost interest in them. I followed those clubs which I found exciting and forgot about the rest of them. Although it can be a mistake, I missed out on many exciting clubs due to this.
Some of the best events I did participate in during this period were as follows: I participated in GGJ (Global Game Jam) and learned something about game-dev ( although I turned out to hate it ), participated in ML, DL, auth and POSTMAN-API workshops and others. These workshops provided a good exposure to me to apply for various Tech Club recruitments, although I was still finding my interest during this whole period.
The Main Clubs I chose and Interviews
After this period, I realized that I liked working on web-dev and data science projects; I attended a few boot camps in the same, which helped me start some basic projects like developing a small game in Python and writing a few web apps. These small things helped me overcome initial inertia in the programming world and helped me learn essential things like Python OOPs, git, REST-APIs, and also something about basic ML. Having worked on all these things, I participated in some on-campus hackathons like the SDSLabs hackathon and other coding events on the campus. This helped me gain valuable experience in how things were conducted on campus. At last, I selected two clubs to be very important to me, i.e., SDSLabs and DSG. Both were very, really good in their projects and GitHub setup and had some ‘charm’ on the campus.
My interview in the SDSLabs got confirmed due to my Makers project, in which I tried to build a Twitter bot that can read Elon Musk’s tweets and find the sentiment analysis regarding Tesla stocks or Cryptocurrencies like DogeCoin. Mind, it can look a bit complicated, and but really, it was stupid in its implementation and can be improved a lot if I worked on it now. But that is how open source works, and you will learn a lot while building such projects.
This interview was a game-changer for me. You probably think I passed with flying colors, but I failed miserably :-(.Still, in this interview, I was grilled so well that I changed many of my ways after that. What were those questions? Most were based on Flask, on which the Twitter bot was developed. The problem was I followed the tutorials with little understanding of the Flask project or the APIs, which did not help my case. I did not know about how Jinga, the main templating engine for Flask and web APIs so I seem to lack experience in this area. I was also naive(and still am ) to assume that my experience was sufficient, but it was not. Still, it greatly helped me in the long run as I changed my approach to learning software development and ML. I escaped the ‘Tutorial Hell’ and started following all documentation seriously, which is very important for any developer.
Next, I sat for the interview at DSG IITR. While I was a little bit familiar with data science,as I had some expertise in Python and liked reading data science-based online articles, I had not completed any major data science courses, though. So the interview was initially very difficult, and due to less knowledge in the relevant areas, was kind of hard for me. But I felt there was something different about these interviews. They were more interesting and I developed a great interest towards this ML and maths community. I had to develop mathematical interpretations for ML models and probabilities, which was a bit complicated yet exciting. And something made me go through them with fewer problems than in previous experiences, and I became a proud member of this new community.
What I gained from my experience at DSG
My experience at DSG was precious to me. I came to be a part of this ’nerdy’ yet exciting community which helped me in many ways as possible. From providing great learning resources in areas relevant to Data science to some dreaded discussion sessions, the atmosphere fills you with a kind of responsibility and fun at the same time. You may have some inhibitions initially, but they all go away as we make our way to form significant friendships and experiences. This journey turned me from a ’noob’ programmer to a data scientist and helped me gain enough confidence in the field. This year, until the Inter-IIT phase, has positively impacted my life and will help me a lot in the future.
Edited: January 15th , 2024