Alumni Spotlights
Overview
*The interviews below took place Summer 2021 and Summer 2022.
ASENA DERIN CENGIZ
What program did you graduate from and when?
MS in Data Science, May 2019
What are you up to?
I’m a Manager on the Advanced Analytics Team at Mindshare (at WPP). I’ve been leading Mindshare’s Advanced Analytics work for BP, Church’s Chicken, ampm, and ARCO clients. I’ve also been participating in new business pitches where our team brings the Data Science offering to new Marketing clients for Mindshare.
What did you enjoy most about the Center for Data Science?
The challenge! It was great to grow so fast, work on so many projects, and get to work as a grader for Prof. Yann LeCun’s Deep Learning class.
How did your time at CDS help you in your success?
Having a master’s in Data Science allowed me to bring the analytic rigor to the table, which was a great supplement to my previous education in Management, as well.
What advice do you have for people who want to get started in data science?
Look for opportunities to participate in projects to broaden your vision (and portfolio) and be willing to take on the extra challenge.
YASH DESHPANDE
What program did you graduate from and when?
MS in Data Science, May 2020
What are you up to?
I’m currently working as a ML Engineer for Fresenius Medical Care, a healthcare company that specializes in kidney care. My responsibilities include operationalizing ML models, exploring opportunities for using NLP on free text, and advancing the company’s data-based decision making focus.
What did you enjoy most about the Center for Data Science?
TI had a great time collaborating with a very talented set of peers and learning as much from them as I did in class. I also thoroughly enjoyed all the NLP coursework and research opportunities at CDS
How did your time at CDS help you in your success?
CDS exposed me to a variety of applications for data science, across a wide range of domains. This made sure I could test the water and eventually pick a field of study that I enjoyed, without being pigeonholed into one thing. Also, of course, superb electives and rigorous coursework.
What advice do you have for people who want to get started in data science?
Many things are data science. ETL pipelines, data cleaning, data governance, analytics, machine learning, ML operations — each is its own creature. If you really want to get into data science, it doesn’t matter where you start, as long as you get to work with real-world data. Go for it!
NOAH KASMANOFF
What program did you graduate from and when?
MS Data Science 2021
What are you up to?
I’m a Full Stack & Machine Learning Engineer at Dwight Funding LLC.
What did you enjoy most about the Center for Data Science?
The wide variety of research done at and around CDS, and how the techniques taught and practiced there allowed me to work on projects in totally different ways.
How did your time at CDS help you in your success?
Getting comfortable being uncomfortable. Since this field is so new and there are topics you wouldn’t have encountered beforehand, I got better at being able to pick up difficult concepts more easily, and figuring out how to ask the right kinds of questions to get that kind of grasp.
What advice do you have for people who want to get started in data science?
Data science is everywhere. Find something you’re passionate about, and see how the data associated with that can be cast into a data science problem that you can feel proud of sharing. It could be a data science project to try and get better at fantasy football, or by analyzing text data of the script of your favorite TV shows. Finding out how to solve the data science problems you can encounter anywhere when it’s related to something you like makes it a lot easier.