How to do a Project by Vaishnavi Gupta
Projects are effective if you wish to understand any topic better. They are also an important part of one’s CV. They help the interviewer to judge the candidate better. In case of absence of a relevant internship, an interesting project helps you to catch the attention of any employer.
Projects can help you to control the flow of an interview. Most of the time the interviewer tends to focus on asking questions from the work that you have already done rather than asking randomly from any topic of statistics. But bear in mind that the questions asked would be in great detail so you should have complete knowledge about all the steps that you have followed. You should be able to answer any queries of the interviewer.
Here are some pointers that helped me while doing any project:
- To start off a project you can first either decide a problem statement that you wish to solve, eg. how the prices of one stock change with respect to the other, or you can start off by choosing a topic of your interest that you wish to explore using a project, eg. correlation, time series etc. I chose my topic first, which was correlation, as I felt that it was something that I was the most confident in.
- The most important aspect of a project after choosing the problem statement is the data. The data should have all the relevant information and it should preferably be more contemporary. I was able to get relevant data from Kaggle and you can also explore data.gov.
- The programming language that you use for doing your project is also of importance. While R may be taught frequently in the academic course, it is not really the language of the future. Instead, the knowledge of Python may come handy for individuals applying for most corporate jobs. SAS is being increasingly used in the Banking domain, SQL is also becoming very popular. The same goes for Alteryx. For visual reporting, try to focus on Power BI and Tableau.
- Try to summarise your analysis in a report which may be in the form of a Word document or a PPT. In this way you can show your work in a condensed form and not jump from one window to another while showing your work to an interviewer. It came in really handy for me as I could show it during my interview when I was asked about it. In your report try to mention your objective, explain the procedure briefly and mention all that you could infer from your analysis but don’t make it too lengthy and wordy. Try to include graphs and pictures and stick to as few pages as possible.
- You should have a github repository where you store all your projects. By sharing the github link, the interviewer can easily see the whole project if she/he wishes to. It should contain your report as well.
These pointers might be useful to start your project but you can always create your own rules. Try to make your projects interesting. They helped me in my and my classmates’ placements and they will surely help you guys too.
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