SCMS in Hindsight | Alumni | Scientific Computing, Modeling & Simulation

Scientific Computing, Modeling & Simulation

SCMS in Hindsight: Harshada Kelkar /* 2021 Sep 26, 12:32:22 */

Harshada Kelkar

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LinkedIn

Association with CMS
MTech Programme in Modeling and Simulation

Epoch of Association
2017-2019

Pre-CMS Education, Occupation, Field
EnTc, cummins college of engineering for women, pune, software test engineer at kpit

Post-CMS Education, Occupation, Field
Mtech from cms, working as data scientist at company named entercoms

Honours and Achievements
None

Curricula and teaching programmes

The curriculum was great. I was happy it was more maths oriented with some complex subjects.. I atleast feel satisfied I learnt something very different like numerical computing or stochastic simulations.. it was soo interesting. I could imagine actually how the matlab math functions for calculus might be working internally because of these subjects. I was very happy, like really happy in student phase at this department.

Teachers

All teachers are GREAT. Very knowledgeable. I have immense respect for all faculty members of this department. Every lecture was soo full of knowledge and so I never liked to miss the lectures.. I never liked to miss even a second when the professors were teaching something. I remember once in a lecture I was very attentive and I dropped my pencil by mistake, went to get it, got distracted and then I could not understand the next part. I had to ask the professor to repeat again. I never took very intense notes.. the way the professors explained everything just stayed in mind.

Overall experience

The environment was great. Office staff, peons, teachers everyone is friendly. I used to talk a lot with cleaners at the department. There is microwave at department it was really useful. Besides, the biggest advantage is that this department is in university of pune. Because of this, you can take courses from other departments, even biology/bioinformatics related. The department has links with NCL, csir, iiser, etc. It is very useful to do internships. The department also has links with different scientists and alumnae who are doing great work here or abroad. All of this adds to our advantage.

Impact on career and growth

Yes, it helped me change my career path and learn something new. It gave me immense confidence. I cant say I am satisfied with the work the indian IT industry offers, but still, because of my educational background and clarity of concepts, I manage to get better projects in my company than others.

Advice for current and future students

The syllabus at the department seems complex sometimes. You might feel that if you are going to get into an IT industry job, why do we need to study complex stuff like transforms, numerical computing, stochastic simulations etc. It is true this is not used in industry, but if you do it sincerely, this will definitely increase your thinking abilities or logical reasoning capacity. You will not be afraid to get a complex algorithm understood from a research paper (this is sometimes needed in IT job as well). You will not be afraid to do a task that you have never handled in your education before because you will have the confidence that you have done even more complex stuff during your mtech years.

Which direction should CMS grow in?

During my tenure at the department, the syllabus was not very much aligned with industry I felt. It was very much research oriented. We also did not have much choices for the 5-credit elective courses, we just had to choose between ML, CFD, or OR. But department is now offering more choices. I also feel they should try to add visualization n data management/sql courses for ML elective. Or if not in syllabus, they should atleast ask the students to do it on udemy. They should also explain basic concepts of software engineering like git, version control, virtual environments, api building/Mlops. Other than that, I felt that the department still did not have a sort of mainstream status in university the way dept of technology-electronics/computer/mech had during my tenure. I think now that the 2 departments have merged to become 1 bigger department, we will get to see this status in future.

Further thoughts

No