Savouring success!
THE CONTRARIAN VIEW
Exactly two and a half years ago, I had written a blog post on how the questions of ‘whether to study or not to study’ and ‘if to study, then what to study’ were bothering me. Heaps of enthusiasm, adventurism, and a leap of faith – all in equal parts – then led to yours truly signing up for the M.Sc. Business Analytics degree programme offered for working professionals by the prestigious Birla Institute of Technology & Science - Pilani institute.
Today, I am proud and elated to share that I have successfully completed this programme!
Spanning across five semesters and a solid two and a half years of duration, this programme aims to inculcate a good understanding of the following three pillars of any successful initiative related to analytics:
Business: developing an understanding of a diverse set of business processes and their typical drivers, risks as well as use-cases for analytics.
Statistics: developing an understanding of various statistical concepts that help frame a mathematical model of what is happening around us and perhaps more importantly, why is it happening so.
Technology: developing an understanding of the tools and methodologies that help us to extract, query and visualize data, infer patterns, and derive actionable insights to be used in predicting and planning for the future.
At the time of signing up for this course, I was confident of navigating my way through the business part of it, while knowing that the other two parts (statistics and technology) would require a lot of toil and tears (which they did).
Looking back, there is a sense of satisfaction in having taken up this challenge, which in turn led to a lot of learning, making new friends for life and having a meaningful distraction during the COVID19 pandemic.
Looking ahead, I hope this addition of a degree helps, much like how the SAP certification helped pivot my career in newer directions. More specifically, I hope that the newly acquired ability to discern facts from fiction within the realms of analytics, helps in evaluating and opining on whether the algorithms that are becoming all pervasive in a digital world are ‘fit-for-purpose’. Towards this end, I shall endeavour to periodically put-up posts that either explain a statistical or a technological concept, especially in the context of their relevance to and in internal auditing.
For now (and may be the next few days) though, it is time to revel and celebrate the success 😊