Megala Kannan received her bachelor’s degree in computer science from the College of Engineering, Guindy in India before moving to New York City for the master’s degree program through the Data Science Institute (DSI) at Columbia University. Today, she is an e-commerce data scientist for PepsiCo. We caught up with her to learn more about her path to DSI and beyond.

How did you become interested in data science?

An internship I did at a startup during my undergrad is what piqued my interest in data science. I learned what it really means to be in the data science space, the problems that we can solve, and the techniques and algorithms that are used to approach these problems.

How did your undergraduate experience prepare you for the DSI curriculum?

It really helped me with my coding knowledge. I picked up Python and a little bit of R in my undergrad years, which was very useful for DSI courses, especially with algorithms and data structures.

Why did you choose to come to Columbia for graduate school?

The course curriculum appealed to me more than data science programs at other colleges.  Moreover, the prestige of being in an Ivy League institution also appealed to me, and I also love New York City.

What do you like most about living in New York City?

The liveliness, hustle, and bustle. It is very similar to my hometown and that’s why I like it. I like that it’s very cosmopolitan and I can meet very different kinds of people.

Which internship opportunities did you have during your DSI studies?

I worked at Johnson & Johnson as a data science intern in the summer of 2019. This was my first corporate experience and it really shaped me in terms of how to deal with real world data science problems.

What was your favorite course at DSI?

I really liked applied machine learning. The course covered a lot of machine learning concepts that now as a data scientist I tend to use in my daily applications. I still sometimes look back and refer to the class slides if I ever need to brush up on ML concepts for an ongoing project.

Tell us about your capstone project.

We worked with the Microsoft research team for our capstone, and our project was matching news articles to Wikipedia pages.

Can you tell us about any of your current work projects?

As an e-commerce data scientist at PepsiCo, I am working on a project about the effects of COVID-19 on the sales and return on investment of Pepsi products. This is very interesting to me as it deals with a large situation we are all facing and its effects on the economic market.

— Sharnice Ottley