Yan Jia

First, group projects and group discussions give me the experience to collaborate with other team members. In graduate learning, group work is one important part to get a successful academic. Almost every course has group project to do, and take a high percentage of total grades. Through these group work experience, I notice that It is difficult to satisfy every member’s need and requirement. Because we have different culture, that makes us have different ways to think the problems. In addition, graduate students have different work and technical experience. Thus, I think that we need to balance the project goal and individual requests. That means sometime we need to do an extra work or reduce the expectations to move forward the group work. That is the team spirit I reflected for ongoing graduate study.

Presentation is also an important part of graduate study. We did this work in each course of pathway program. I need to prepare one presentation for weeks even for whole semester. The experience tells me that It is a disaster, if we don’t have good presentation skills. Because audience don’t know how many nights you have spent, or how difficult you faced when doing research. The only way they adjust or evaluate your work is through the minutes presentation. For the presentation, I need to dress professionally, give a clarified visualization, such as posters or PPTs. When introducing the project, handouts should be prepared if necessary. Time management also need to control, in case too long time make audience feel boring and misunderstanding the key concepts. And, always have a plan B, in case the computer broke out. These presentation experience I will keep in mind for future presentations.

Major courses give me many knowledge of Big Data, and help me clary what specific things I would like to explore deeply in data analytics field. For example, AIT 580 introduce the whole process of solve a big data problem. Through that course, I get a general framework to collect data, storage data, curate data, analyze data, etc. I have known that a big data team needs many members working together, including manager, analyst, developer, DBA, etc. Thus, I need to stop worrying that I can’t handle ever thing of big data. I only need to choose two to three aspects to deeply explore in future. But, I still need to know what kind of big data tools and topics are mostly popular. So I can choose a better solution and communicate it with team efficiently. For ongoing graduate study, I will focus on learning these aspects: R, Python, machine learning, visualization, Hadoop ecosystem. Compare to try to know every tools and techniques, I believe focusing on these specific skills will help me study efficiently, and make me quickly become a competitive candidate.