Summer 2019 Internship Experience

#UTDMSBA #UTD #JSOM

Apilation.ai is an intelligent information mining company designed from the ground up to innovate, develop, and deliver the Big Data analytics needs of our post-IOT data-centric society by providing the people, process, and technologies that empower our clients to:

1) Connect ubiquitously

2) Analyze instinctively

3) Act intelligently

Apilation leverages disruptive non-relational (NoSQL) database, analytics, machine learning / artificial intelligence (ML/AI), and visualization technologies in entirely new ways to solve the business integration challenge combining a patent-pending API-based No-SQL data integration process with analytic data mining and predictive next best action into the industry’s highest performance technology collaboration platform.

I joined Apilation as a Data Analyst intern in the “Analytics and the Customer Experience Team”. During the course of this internship, I got various opportunities to apply my theoretical knowledge gained during my Master's in Business Analytics at UTD to real world problems and gain valuable industry experience.

Amongst some of the key skills I learned during this internship experience are :

1. Understanding the business problem, collecting data sources and data preprocessing. Being new to the project at Apilation, I was involved from the requirement elicitation phase of the customer and business problem. I got the opportunity to understand how consumer packaged goods data can be used for detailed analysis and how to convey your insights in the form of a story.

2. Use appropriate models of analysis, assess the quality of input, derive insight from results, and investigate potential issues.

3. Learning how to communicate with entrepreneurs, customers, and other participants of the technology start-up ecosystems.

I got the opportunity to work in different domains ranging from brainstorming KPIs for your clients, how to prep the data according to the client's needs, creating new features from existing ones to building interactive real-time dashboards to tell the story as per the client's requirements. I also worked on developing a recommendation engine with the help of Herman Crank who has constantly been there for my help. Also, the interesting reads that Herman shared with me related to my work helped me a lot in understanding what is going on in today's world and what technologies to look out for.

The internship experience helped me technically and personally in various aspects.

1. Hands on training with several technical tools that come handy for data analytics like Sql, Python, Edge, Tableau, Excel, Jsonar.

2. Better prepared for office etiquettes

3. Working with strict deadlines

4. Delivering an end to industry standard product

Overall, I feel very confident and motivated to apply the skills I have acquired during my “Master's Degree at UTD” and the enriching internship experience at “Apilation” to solving challenging real-world problems. This has been a helpful kickstart for my career to reach much greater heights.

This enriching internship experience would not have been possible without the mentorship and support of talented seniors at Apilation. They have guided and mentored me during the course of 15 weeks. I would like to thank Ashna Upadhyay for always being there to help me, I would like to especially thank John J.K Lee for being an amazing mentor. The mentorship sessions I had with John every week helped me understand the business aspect of the work and how to plan better for my career ahead apart from understanding and working on the assigned tasks.

#UTDMSBA #UTD #JSOM