Who is Shruthi Saxena?

I hail from Tamil Nadu, the southern most state of India. My only goal in life is to just be happy and I take life as it comes. Having not traveled much in first 20 years of my life, I enjoy traveling, being on the road for days, trying different cuisines and meeting new people. My plan is to take a flight to Alaska to see the northern lights the very next day I graduate!

Having a knack for psychology, I am always intrigued to know more about other cultures, their food styles and how the conditioning in early life impacts an adult.

I do pencil sketching once in a while. Having brought up in a family that practices Ayurveda, I have a firm belief that anything one wants can be achieved by bringing about a right balance between mind, body and soul.

Overall, I live by the below mantra,

\(Life = Kindness * Empathy * Compassion * Gratitude\)

Academic Background

School of Chemical and Biotechnology, SASTRA University

Undergraduation

B.tech - Industrial Biotechnology, SASTRA UNIVERSITY, India.

  • Fact: My undergraduation final year thesis was about designing a drug that helped in ceasing the toxicity of a skin disease causing bacteria called as Staphylococcus aureus. This project allowed me to work with 40 rats as a part of animal testing. Hence, I am good at handling rodents!

Professional Background

IBM India Pvt. Ltd

Test Specialist (Jun 2013 – May 2014)
  • After graduation, I started my professional stint with IBM as a test specialist for a year. This role taught me the basics of database management and software development.
  • I was awarded with Orion/ IBM-GBS GD eminence & excellence award in 2014, which is given only to top 10% performers.
ETL Data Specialist (Jun 2014 – Mar 2017)
  • After Working as a functional tester for a year, I ended up doing a lot of data manipulation work using SQL. My quest to learn more helped me secure an ETL developer role which mainly involved using IBM Datastage tool for Data Engineering process. This role allowed me to develop end to end database workflow in a high priority analytics project for a power grid client.
  • Received SAM Performance Award and National Grid Appreciation Award for exceptional performance in Project SAM.

TIAA GBS

Analyst (Apr 2017 – Nov 2018)
  • As I worked on Energy and Utilities domain since the start of my career, I joined TIAA to expand my skillset into Insurance domain. This role allowed me to leverage my past skillset on a wider and larger scale such as :
    • Automating a manual process of a Treasury workflow and helping clients save $200,000.
    • Leading more than 30 agile based ETL and DB deployments and delivered the codes with utmost quality.
  • Received ‘Pat on The Back Award’ for outstanding performance in projects Treasury and Bank Loans in 2018.

Hiatus

After a certain stage, I felt the need to quietly introspect about my hitherto achievements and make crucial decisions regarding my prospects. Since I had never taken a long break in my professional career, I took the time off to research, self-analyze, and determine my goals and aspirations.
As I left my job in November 2018, I have spent my time qualitatively in identifying my strengths and weakness and worked on its improvement. To ensure that my higher education is both standardized and in tandem with the latest economic trends, I took up few online courses on Tableau, Business Intelligence Analysis and R programming. Thereafter, I decided to pursue a Master’s degree in Business Analytics, a revolutionary field of Industry 4.0.

Experience with R

I have taken few R certifications in the past as follows:

  • Introduction to R from online platform- DataCamp in 2016
  • R Programming A-Z- Udemy in 2019

However, I have been using R frequently ever since the start of MS BANA program. I hope to learn more through the Data Wrangling course.