Hello World!

Working from home & not travelling has opened up a lot of time to gain new skills through online learning. Recently, I secured a scholarship with Microsoft Azure & Udacity as a Machine Learning scholar. As a part of the scholarship I had to complete a Machine Learning curriculum that included lectures, study materials , quizzes and labs in a limited amount of time. It was a quite fun experience to learn & work with other scholars ranging from students, recent graduates to working professionals.

Here are my recommendations to help working professionals ace their back to school game

1. Make Sure You’re In A Team Not A Group

The first thing that stood out for me was the diversity of background,experiences and for the reasons why scholars are participating. Students or recent graduates might not have experience but they bring sheer will power to deep dive & research the issue. Rather than seeking comfort in the same group of professionals, make the most of this opportunity and connect or set 1-1 with diverse professionals. End of the today your team would be made up of diverse strengths rather than a group of similar people

2. Control Your Mind Reading

Our human minds reads extremely faster – that’s one of the reasons why presentations do not have a lot of text. Imagine Steve Jobs famous presentation when introducing iPhone was filled with text instead! In your online class you would find the slides to have a lot of text since they are aimed at teaching people from various backgrounds at a slower pace. I spent the first class of my course reading through deck rather than following instructions. Realizing my mistake, I trained myself to follow the instructor’s voice & read from the slide only when pointed to. It took sometime to get used to but this process, though slow has helped me immensely!

3. Use Paper Based Storage System

Our upbringing has trained our brains to remember and interpret things better when we write them on paper. That makes doodling & taking notes as a means of paper based storage system. Just like your work always have a pen and paper next to your device. Keep drawing scribbling, doodling, mind maps as the concepts are being explained and you would never be left behind

4. Learning New Concepts Can Be Hard

I have almost spend a decade in leading digital transformation & this time I found myself on the other end of transformation from unlearning to relearning. On my Day 1 I had accepted that learning new concepts would be hard in terms of taking more time to understand & implement. That honest acceptance helped me to be realistic in my time management and set goals accordingly. All of the sessions were recorded and I made sure I watched the recordings of the sessions which had new or concepts I am struggling with. So prepare to be honest with yourself & allow more time.

5. Complete & Then Break Your Lab

The scholarship program required a lot of labs to be completed using Microsoft Azure sandboxes. After completing the mandatory assignment, I would wander around by extending the assignment to understand better. Often it would lead to catastrophic errors just like above. But I learned a lot of Auto ML and how to best use the visual UI to mirror functionality of ML modules which are usually humongous with code.