Interview with Ishita Mathur, Data Scientist at Gojek

The Atlan Team met Ishita Mathur, a data scientist at Gojek, at The Fifth Elephant 2019 (organized by HasGeek). A community-led event, The Fifth Elephant is one of India’s most popular data science conferences with speakers from Gojek, Anaconda, Flipkart, Clustr, Simpl and more.

The HasGeek team was kind enough to help our team set up interviews with some of the best speakers at the event. This interview is with Ishita Mathur, who’s been working as a data scientist for almost two years at Gojek. We spoke about her background, qualities expected from data scientists and ways in which the humans of data can keep themselves updated.

Check out the complete interview with Ishita here.

Can’t watch the video and looking for a transcript? We’ve got you covered. Here’s the complete transcript of the interview.

Interview transcript

I’ve been working as a data scientist for the past three years and currently I’m working with Gojek, where I have been for the past one year and nine months, almost.

What is your background?

So my background is in physics, I studied in Delhi University and my undergrad project was around experimental particle physics, so that involved dealing with a lot of data from CERN, which was essentially terabytes per second.

So I got interested into the big data side of things from there, and high-performance computing. So I decided to apply for a Masters in High Performance Computing with Data Science in the UK.

I wanted to work for a startup, and so I moved back to India and I started working at a data scientist here in 2016.

What are qualities that data scientists should have?

You’re not always right and for data scientists to admit that they can be wrong, is a very important value. You shouldn’t always keep defending your decision, even when logic says otherwise. So yeah, that is one very important quality to have.

Another quality is to encourage learning within the team and, sort of, share what you have learned with the rest of the team as well, and that’s not just within data science.
To sort of make sure that the engineering team, the product team, the business teams kind of know what is going on.

How can data scientists keep themselves updated?

Read blogs from companies. Personally, I feel that Airbnb and Uber have amazing tech blogs.

Gojek’s tech blog is also pretty awesome, like on the engineering side of things. On the data science side of things, I think we’re still starting out. But yeah, it’s really good to read up a lot.

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