This is my foray into writing and what a time it is to start. I’ve just graduated from RMIT University with a Masters degree in Data Science. I remember being extremely excited about the life ahead. I thought it would be 2 long years of grinding and hustle but it seems to have gone by smoothly. Time has definitely flown by though, like it’s only been a few months since I arrived. This write up is a reflection of my time in Melbourne so far.

A little bit of background might be necessary for those of you who don’t know me. I’m from Chennai, India. I have a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from SRM University and a couple of years of experience working in product. I was a solution engineer/product consultant, and focused primarily on customer onboarding, operations, support, learning and development. I could’ve joined EY as a Software Engineer but I wanted to work in product no matter what. The two years I spent there led me to my realisation of the passion I had for data science and large scale software applications. I was thoroughly fascinated by a particular AI/ML feature deployed across multiple AWS regions on a multi-tenant architecture. That is exactly what I wanted to do. So I decided to study further, and study somewhere I knew I’d learn a lot for sure. I decided against US and EU for various reasons and landed on Australia.

Life is very different outside of India. Working part time at McDonalds or a supermarket like Woolworths was unthinkable back then. I never would’ve seen myself walking in and out of dozens of shops to hand out my resume hoping to get a call. Truly grateful for that experience as it’s certainly built me to handle the current state of the tech job market (it is not good). I’ve since spent over a year working as a cashier and customer service person at a supermarket. While it is not particularly enjoyable given how repetitive it is, I’m incredibly grateful because they gave me a chance.

As for my masters degree, it was unbelievably smooth. And that’s mostly due to the support and facilities I had at my disposal. My experience is not representative of the average international student’s experience so I’ll just focus on my coursework and learnings.

My favourite courses were Advanced Programming in Python, Practical Data Science in Python, Big Data Processing and Cloud Computing. I won’t lie, big data was painful at the time but looking back, I picked up a lot of patterns and concepts that has since made some of my personal projects a breeze to work on. The other courses focussed on NLP, Recommender Systems and building cloud native software. All of which are crucial to be relevant in the tech space these days. My favourite part about these courses were the assignments. They were large and complex, but doing them forced me to put my learnings to practice. This is infinitely better than writing exams.

Coursework aside, RMIT itself was amazing. For starters, not having to worry about my clothing was great. I remember being asked to leave the classroom for wearing a round-neck tee at SRM. This might be specific to those who studied there but yes, if you were there you’d know how incredibly frustrating it was. Lets come back to RMIT, imagine getting free food and beer every Thursday. Amazing. Interesting events every other week? Brilliant. Free access to Adobe tools? Fantastic. I could go on about RMIT for a while so long story short, life was great.

There are a few things I regret though. It is quite difficult to manage school, work and a social life. If I had to do this all over again, I would probably focus a little bit more on my social life. I did hang out with my friends, have nice nights out, and fun road trips. But over the last few months of my coursework, I toned it down significantly. I, maybe, could’ve done more in that regard as I still would’ve achieved similarly great academic returns. Anyway, with academics out of the way, I can now take some time off and enjoy life for a bit. Special mentions to Priyanka, Pranav Dev, Yazhini, Ocean (my behen), Krithik and a smattering of others for these two years and hopefully, for more to come. And an even more special mention to Aswathi, my partner. The last few months would’ve been significantly harder without her.

So that’s the last 2 of my 18 years of formal education. Lived it, loved it, now I say farewell. The journey ahead looks quite bumpy, but I look forward to taking it on. Let’s see how it goes. Thank you for reading!