before aishwarya srinivasan began studying computer science at vit vellore institute of technology she already had developed an interest in data science that came partly from her mother who was a research scientist at the international management institute imi in delhi aishwarya had an aptitude for mathematics and was curious about how data science could solve real world problems in college she reached out to professors for internships during her first semester she interned with the anthropology department at delhi university the phd students were studying hereditary handwriting styles in different generations using matlab a computing platform i developed a software to recognise handwriting features like a slant skewness margin gap etc it works much like ocr optical character recognition and is more efficient she says today data science has applications in every industry and aishwarya explored them during her university years by doing 11 internships including at ey microsoft and national informatics centre she helped publish five papers at vit and delhi university when she interned for tcs she worked on building models to use historical data and macroeconomic factors among other data to predict stock index movements of the sensex and nifty i tried exploring different industrial usecases through these internships and learnt varied applications of data science she says another internship was during her masters at columbia university i worked with a professor to contribute to scikit learn scikit learn is a python machine learning library and we analysed the largescale use cases of the library and improved its interface she says during her masters she also worked with a surgeon from the universitys medical centre to develop a forecasting model to detect acute kidney injuries while a patient was undergoing surgery we finished the project and published a paper she says after three years with ibm in the us where she filed a patent on machine trading using reinforcement learning she recently moved to google she says shes excited to explore the retail market chain where data science is used to improve customer recommendations and reduce waste in inventory when i was considering doing my phd my mother suggested that i would be happier solving real life problems and she was right i have a lot to thank my professors who were my mentors during college she says aishwarya says a data science career isnt limited to coding neither is it limited to the technology field data science as a domain requires different skillsets and experience it requires product managers engineers scientists subject matter experts who build the technology paired with social science researchers data privacy experts and policy makers who make sure that the solution is built in an ethical mannerlast year aishwarya began a small volunteer mentorship platform for students learning ai and data science most students are unsure of which specialisation to pick and which sector to work in the ideal way to go about it is to play by their strengths and explore a couple of options before settling down