“I started my internship with OCTAVE in January of this year. With already 30 years of work experience, it was interesting to join as an ‘intern’ no doubt – an adventure I was eager to take on to help support my MSc. in Big Data. It feels like I am living the role of Robert De Niro in the movie “The Intern”. I feel blessed – with the opportunity to work with industry experts – since very few are able to obtain a real-life experience in the field that they are studying, during their degree period.
Many industry experts and management have the notion that data analytics can be done by 2-3 guys on any given day on a few Excel sheets. Oh, and Big Data, that’s just lots of Excel sheets put together. It is a field of science that people are yet to grasp the complete understanding of its potential – even though we all got a glimpse of its undertaking in the past 2 years as millions and billions of data were collected to fight the raging COVID pandemic.
It is only when you join a visionary company like OCTAVE that you get to appreciate and comprehend the realm of Big Data. One quickly learns that it’s NOT just 2-3 guys but a platoon of data scientists, data engineers, data visualization team, and many more are required to get their hands dirty when it comes to playing with Big Data. In the past 6 months, I was able to both learn and understand the industry requirements and its asks, as well as share my own previous industry-related experience in project management. My experience here has given me ideas/options on what topic to select for my dissertation.
Today I’m proud to be part of this fantastic team of professionals and I encourage any student who is presented with such an internship opportunity to immediately seize the offer. The value gained by studying and simultaneous experience put together leads the way to being the chosen “candidate”. There are few people I must thank and appreciate their collaborative efforts both here at the University of Stirling and at OCTAVE in providing such opportunities for students like myself. It is such initiative programs that are the cornerstones of our University of Stirling that solidify our path beyond the corridors of the university. I’m a proud alumnus of the University of Stirling. At this point, I humbly wish to say, thank you.” – Quazi