Meet Prateek Ganguli : PhD Student completes BS in Data Science

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:15]My name is Pratik Gangali. I joined the IITM BS program in 2020. Just got into my engineering degree which was a BTE and CS from Kolkata University. Towards the end of 2024, I started applying for higher education opportunities, PhD offer from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So, I'm currently a PhD student. Actually, I'm a PhD candidate right now. I recently passed my candidacy exam. So, like guaranteed funding PhD student right now. I really felt like the Btech degree that I was in really didn't cover everything that I wanted to learn as an individual and also for my professional growth. vital courses like stats one and stats. So especially what professor Andrew taught and also we had wonderful guest lecturers like Madhavan Mukarn from uh CMI. So those courses which were taught during the ITM courses especially like diploma 1, diploma 2 and then the BS course those were really helpful knowledge that I learned from the BS degree course that comes in really handy in a few niche cases and that saves the day. So I feel like yeah it was a really good boost my own motivation which was like personal to me in the sense that I was like oh I've I've spent like one or maybe even two years of going to this all these proctored exams for IIT Madras and I'm just so close to getting my degree. So just bite the bullet and like finish everything. It's just so close.

[00:01:40]So and if you do everything properly then you can get a degree from IIT Madras which is like really prestigious.

[00:01:47]So to me it was more the being close to the end which kept on like pushing me.

[00:01:53]So I feel like initially people who get enrolled in this course if they face a lot of challenges they might feel more motiv like demotivated and they might not really see the reason to proceed on with the course. But I would say really just it gets better and honestly all the coursework kind of builds on top of each other. So if you don't take any shortcuts in the beginning, you'll do just well in the end. So just hang in there. Keep on doing everything that you're told by your instructors. You don't have to like spend 24 hours a day just like doing this. So it's really possible to balance both a physical degree as well as the IIT Madras course and like get a good enough CGP and like finish everything. So it's possible and you don't have to like do like you know you can take breaks of course it's not like that's the only thing I did like I also went for a lot of internships I actually in 2021 I interned at Debian through Google summer of code and that was a 3-month internship and then towards the beginning of 2024 I also went for an internship at this uh company in Solic sector 5 aology they work with AI cameras and they use them at connector. So what I'm saying is it's entirely possible to maintain two degrees and also go for internships without you know just sacrificing all of your life like I also have a lot of time to just spend with family and friends.

[00:03:19]So for me that was like getting the degree for someone else it might be something else like maybe increasing their skills to let's say get a promotion at their work or maybe uh becoming more up to date with the modern skill set that is required in this day and age. So yeah, I was part of several MLP vivas. So I got to take the vivors of several students and it was a wonderful experience since I took my own MLP course and I got an S grade. So then after that I was given this opportunity of taking the vivas of several people and one interesting uh interaction which I remember was that when we were taking these vivvers like amongst the people who were taking the vivors we would often look at like oh who is on the top of the lead leaderboard? what kind of code must this guy have? And we were all curious like okay, how do we get such a good like score on the leaderboard and anyway so like we were going about on rubrics like just looking at their workbooks and seeing how they can like improve these things giving them constructive criticism. I was very lucky I got that same person who got the top score on the leaderboard as one of my fif entrance. So after the viviveror was over like I had some extended talk with him after the recording was over to like really know what he was doing in life as well and he told me that he was actually working in a startup where they were dealing with things like medical information. I was part of a really wonderful group for my DVD course which is the data visualization design course and the project for that was something like we had to build a dashboard for some sort of a data set and tell a story. So the data that we got was something like people's eating habits and I was in this group of three like there was this one other bachelor student I think also from the Kolkata region and another person from the Mumbai region. the three of us together like spent a lot of hours building our project and ultimately we got the best project award for that DVD uh uh semester. So yeah, I I had lots of opportunities to build connections. It's more closer to the hardware and software. So where would data science fit in? But we still have to for our experiments often times involve the use of random distributions or things like statistics. And the ITM team was always really supportive and helpful and even when I needed the transcripts for my application to the PhD programs. It took just one email to the support team and they like finished everything in one day. So I was really glad for that. It's a great opportunity to build connections. It's a great opportunity to learn coursework or go through other skill sets which you might not come across a regular bachelor's program. I would really advise fresh entrance especially people who are maybe switching jobs or looking for places to improve their portfolio to really look into this programs.