#66DaysofData Member Spotlight: Saurabh Joshi
This is the sixth in a weekly series spotlighting different members of the 66DaysofData discord community, an initiative started by data scientist and YouTuber Ken Jee. You can find out more about the initiative here and here. The intent of this series is to celebrate those who have made it through the challenge already (although it never truly ends!); share their stories; learn from their successes and failures; and hopefully inspire anybody else walking this path, wherever you happen to be in your journey. If you’re interested in joining the community, you can do so here.
While Saurabh Joshi has settled on pursuing data analyst type roles in the data science sphere, it was thanks to the magic of machine learning that we’ve crossed paths.
As an information technology student, he was focused on pursuing web development heading into his undergraduate degree. However, after starting school, he was exposed to a lot more of the potential careers in IT and eventually enrolled in IBM’s data science professional certificate on Coursera. Intrigued by the ability to use data to solve real world problems, Saurabh started doing his research and learning more about the field on YouTube… and finally YouTube’s recommendation algorithm led him to Ken Jee, through his Data Science Project from Scratch YouTube series.
After continuing to dive into the field through Udemy courses and more YouTube videos, Saurabh joined the 66 Days of Data challenge. He credits the initiative and the community for helping him in a lot of ways; he had the opportunity to expand his knowledge on different technologies and found it a strong motivation to be consistent in his data science efforts. There’s always an opportunity to learn and get feedback from others, share projects and to learn by helping others solve their issues.
There are so many areas in data science and it seems like Saurabh did his best to explore them all, from analysis and visualization skills, to web scraping with BeautifulSoup, to machine learning, to mastery of database querying. When I asked him what he wishes he had done differently, I loved his answer:
Not quite satisfied with how far he’s already come, his response was essentially a regret that he wasn’t able to do more of everything.
More Tableau. More visualization overall. More of a focus on SQL from the ground up. More Python from an object-oriented programming perspective. More in-depth exploration of pandas and NumPy. More analytics projects. More machine learning.
There’s a fine balance in straddling the line between acknowledging the progress you’ve made and realizing there’s still so much more progress to be made and I think he’s found it. While thirsting for more knowledge, Saurabh was also quick to acknowledge the small wins — and the bigger wins.
Since starting his data science journey, he has been able to land a data science internship and has performed well in numerous student hackathons. Still, his success hasn’t slowed him down from pushing further. If anything, it’s reflecting on his journey that has helped him keep up the momentum. Other than being consistent every day, my favourite advice from him for newer members of the data science community is to realize that there are tangential things that’ll play a big part in your success too.
Domain knowledge, focusing on solving the right problems and being a good communicator are critical parts of this field so work on those too.
Saurabh will be graduating next year but his quest for knowledge continues. His future may include a masters degree at some point. It will definitely include more Plotly, more Tableau, more Streamlit… more.
You can read more from Saurabh on LinkedIn and on Twitter. His Medium account has no posts… yet, but maybe one day!
Finally, if you’d like to join a community of data science learners in all stages of the journey, feel free to join the 66DaysofData discord server.
