Analytics at Great Lakes

Well, this blog post is about my journey with Analytics at Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai. I was a PGDM student (Mauryas batch 2016-18) at the institution and I’m sharing some of the memorable experience that I had with Analytics in the two years.

Prior joining Great Lakes, I had exposure to analytics with the help of few online courses offered in edX and Coursera.org. It helped me in have a strong foundation in Analytics and well versed in R programming.

Courses

On my first day at Great Lakes, we had a boot camp session on Statistics and R programming. It was one of the most relaxed sessions that I ever attended at Great Lakes since I already knew the concepts. But, I later realized that I was also at the bottom of the mountain.

It all started with the Quantitative Methods of Decision Making – 1 course in Semester 1 which was thought by our Associate Dean Dr. Vaidy Jayaraman. One of the most memorable things of the class was the late night deadlines for homework. In the second semester, we had Quantitative Methods of Decision Making – 2 by Dr. P. K. Viswanathan. Dr. P. K. Viswanathan is one of India’s Top 10 Analytics Academicians. He is also the mentor for the Analytics Committee at Great Lakes. The course QMDM-2 covered the basics of Statistics and we were exposed to Excel and R for the first time. In our 3rd Semester, we had Business Analytics by Prof. Yugandhar which dived deeper into Analytics.

It was also time for me to decide the electives for next year. It was the simplest decision-making process as I decided to take all the course which were under Analytics. I had a difficult time with understanding Options, Future and Derivate (I’m bad at finance, but I took it put as it was a prerequisite to Financial Risk Analytics). Well, even though I flunked in OFD, FRA was easy going for me. Web & Social Media Analytics was another interesting course (I was also the Course Coordinator) which gave insights into Google Analytics and other social media analytics. You can find my final project of the course here on Make in India Campaign.

But my favorite course was Data Visualisation and Analytics which was thought by Prof. Raghavshyam and Prof. Vivek Anand. The only reason why I loved this course is that it changed my perception. I learned data visualization is daydreaming with a purpose. The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures. Advanced Analytical Model by Prof. Krishna Mohan and Business Intelligence by Prof. Vinit Thakur were some of the other courses that I enjoyed at Great Lakes.

Analytics Committee

Well, since my obvious choice and interest was towards Analytics, I decided to join the Analytics Committee at Great Lakes. The first year of the committee was fun filled. We organized an internal machine learning competition called Datalytics and a blogging contest. It was just the beginning as we set our paths to a bigger goal of hosting a national level Analytics Competition.

We marked our beginning in the Annual B-school fest L’Attitude 1305 with Data Tales – Beyond Infinity, a machine learning competition organized in association with Analytics Vidhya. I was responsible for developing the case study for the competition. Things were seriously out of control, as the event was a grand success. With over 200 participants, we had teams from ISB, IIMs and IIT’s coming down to Great Lakes for the finals.

It was a great teamwork – two people whom I can never forget is Akshay Jasoriya and Rahul Namdev from PGPM 2017 batch. A small team committed to cause bigger than themselves can achieve absolutely anything. The first year’s Analytics Committee was one of the best team’s that I ever worked with.

It was internship time and when I was back into campus, there was already a committee for Analytics. There were 10 new members from the PGPM batch. We later recruited 3 members from the PGDM 1st year batch. I found it difficult to feed my team with two pizzas (because the pizza wasn’t large enough). But, it was still a good year. We had a workshop on Extracting Data from Twitter, Newsletter and the second edition of Data Tales. A large team but I must acknowledge a few new friends I made – Abinandan A, Krishna Prabhat, Susan Abraham and Vinotha Krishna.

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Participating at BADM Championship at NMIMS Mumbai with Akshaya and Vignesh

We also got a chance to participate in the finals Business Analytics & Data Mining Championship 2017 with my teammates Akshaya S and Vignesh S. It was a 24-hour hackathon (a sleepless night) that too with SAS (I had no clue what I was doing). But, it was a good learning experience for us.

So, if you are interested in Analytics, Great Lakes is one of the best places to be. I was not an engineering student, but learning a new language like R & Python was so much fun. I was disappointed with the fact that I couldn’t major in Analytics – however, I still have a lot of memories and learning at the end of the day.

Comment below, if you would like to know anything about Analytics at Great Lakes

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