Sarang Gupta received his bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering and business management from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and worked at Goldman Sachs in operations before graduate school. Today, the 2020 alumnus of the master’s degree program through the Data Science Institute (DSI) at Columbia University is a data scientist at Asana’s San Francisco office.

Congratulations! Tell us about your new role at Asana.

My work focuses on statistical modeling and machine learning to help our business teams within fields such as product, marketing, and sales utilize insights from data.

What helped to pique your interest in data science?

My first exposure to data science was during a student consulting project that I was a part of during my undergraduate studies. I spent extensive time creating data analytical frameworks to track consumer behavior on social media platforms to understand customers’ pain points for a major airline. The experience of working on this project revealed to me how collecting and analyzing data can power intelligent decision making and drive business growth. I was confident that I wanted to pursue a career in this field.

How did your undergraduate experience prepare you for DSI?

Courses relating to statistics and probability were particularly very helpful as I started my program at DSI. The curriculum is heavy on statistics and programming, so I felt the statistics courses in my undergrad provided me with a strong base for the courses that I took here at DSI. Having a good hold of some basic programming and computer science concepts before joining DSI will also help you to hit the ground running.

 

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

Columbia’s data science program is one of the first and probably one of the best data science programs in the world. As someone new to the data science field, I felt that the courses offered by DSI were very up-to-date and would help me well prepare for the industry from the ground up. Furthermore, DSI’s connections with other departments and schools at Columbia allows one to work on a wide range of data science problems and explore their specific interests within the data science field.

 

What was your favorite course at DSI?

My favorite courses were Machine Learning taught by John Paisley and Algorithms for Data Science taught by Eleni Drinea. The two courses covered the theoretical aspects of common machine learning and computer science algorithms respectively. They provided me with a good foundation for some of the other applied data science courses that I took at DSI and were also helpful in establishing the theoretical base necessary to be a good data scientist. I found these courses very relevant as I prepared for my internship and job interviews.

 

Which internship opportunities did you have during your DSI studies?

I interned at Care/of, a healthcare startup, as a data scientist in NYC. This was my first data science job and I had the opportunity to apply a lot of the concepts that I learned from my courses at DSI to real world problems. More specifically, I worked on financial forecasting, developing probabilistic machine learning models to forecast future demand for the company’s product. I learned a lot from this experience and got a good exposure to what the work of a data scientist looks like.

 

Tell us about your capstone project.

Our capstone project sponsor was Bloomberg and the project was about developing a classification model to predict whether a news story on the Bloomberg terminal was an editorial or a regular article. Through the project, we had the opportunity to work on a real world problem and develop an end-to-end data science solution using state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning models. The mentorship and guidance provided by our industry partners were helpful for our career development.

 

What will you miss about living in New York City?

I felt very welcomed in NYC as soon as I moved. It was my first time living in NYC. I have previously lived, studied, and worked in three cities in three different countries and continents, but living in NYC was probably the best. The city is very vibrant and there is so much to do and explore, no matter what your passion and interests are. You can watch a world-famous Broadway play, take a pleasant stroll in Central Park and gaze at the magnificent NYC skyline all in one day. What else do you need for a perfect weekend?

— Robert Florida