A remarkable experience

26-year-old Shivam Bansal described his journey in the NUS Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) programme to be one that had “completely met his expectations”.

Prior to enrolling into the programme, Shivam was a lead data scientist who built and developed analytics products for the insurance domain. With 5 years of working experience in various industries such as healthcare and retail, Shivam had previously honed implementation skills related to data science and analytics. However, the drive to strengthen his technical skills and foundation of analytics concepts prompted him to further his studies through NUS MSBA which has been designed to enable experiential learning by balancing intellectual academic rigour and hands-on applications. “I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the “business” side of the field—” said Shivam, “—and gain more exposure on how analytics is applied to different business verticals. This programme provided both technical and business courses that were highly aligned with my interests.”

In MSBA, Shivam could choose the modules he wanted to take and design his own curriculum, which he felt was unique. The faculties, capstone projects and industry collaborations were also particularly impressive, he noted. The MSBA programme provides students with the exposure to different skillsets and technologies that are adopted and practiced across different industries and companies. As the MSBA programme takes one year for full-time candidature, it was ideal for Shivam as he was interested in a course which he can finish in the shortest possible amount of time.

Highly motivated, Shivam also participated in various events. Forming a team with 5 other NUS students, Shivam’s team represented NUS in a global fintech competition hosted at China where they built a complete fintech platform using blockchain and machine learning for personal initial public offering, or IPO. Fintech, also known as financial technology, is the use of new technologies to deliver financial services, and is one of the fastest growing sectors in the finance industry. His team beat 7 other competitors and won the “Pioneer Award”.

In the Analytics Innovation Challenge hosted in collaboration with Johnson & Johnson, Shivam and 3 other classmates created an Artificial Intelligence based solution to automate a text generation process of financial analysts and won First Place.

Shivam also volunteered to share his knowledge on Python for pre-processing with fellow classmates during one of the workshops organised by the NUS Business Analytics Club students.

“These experiences added a lot of fun and fulfilment in the past one year,” Shivam reminisced.

Despite the hectic school schedule, Shivam holds the title of Grandmaster in the Kaggle community, the highest tier in the ranking section. Kaggle is the world’s most popular and largest data science online community that offers a medium for companies to host highly competitive data science challenges and Kaggle Kernels is a platform that helps run programs more efficiently. He shared more than 40 Kaggle Kernels in less than a year and earned more than 10 awards — two of which were from the Data Science for Good challenges.

“Kaggle gave me a platform to showcase my skills related to machine learning, data visualisation, natural language processing and data storytelling. I started it only as a side interest but my Kaggle experience definitely benefitted me. Many big companies and people recognised my work,” Shivam explained.

In July this year, Shivam’s submission emerged first amidst 250 others in a prestigious Data Science competition hosted on Kaggle and sponsored by the City of Los Angeles. This also marks his third win in a Kaggle competition.

According to Shivam, this was one of the more challenging competitions due to the lack of structure in the problem statement. Despite that, he paid attention to the structuring of data which was termed as almost perfect according to the hosts, and provided valuable insights through analysis of unconscious bias and readability of City of Los Angeles’s job bulletins. The hosts even complimented Shivam on the detailed recommendations he proposed for the City of Los Angeles to consider and how he made the visualizations beautiful to look at and easy to interpret.

Overall, Shivam described his MSBA experience as remarkable. “I was able to get the knowledge, exposure, network, and maturity that I was expecting.”

Shivam also attributes his gratifying experience to interacting and building connections with professors, and fellow course mates who were from diverse backgrounds and cultures. He even learned some Chinese and Korean along the way.

To top it all up, Shivam’s capstone project was selected amongst his cohort as one of the top five Outstanding Capstone Projects.

His advice to interested applicants is to clearly identify what they wish to gain from the programme. As the data science industry is changing rapidly, Shivam recommends that it is important to gain the right skills. He asserts that a valuable data scientist is one who can not only develop something that positively contributes to analytics, but also communicate well. “For me, MSBA was the platform through which I polished these skills,” he added.