Everyone’s Taking the Same Courses. Do This Instead
Possibly, you are pursuing B Tech CSE Data Science in India and have already enrolled in a couple of courses on Coursera or even on edX on Python, machine learning or even SQL. It is a productive feeling. It seems to be a need. The issue is that, though, anyone and everyone is doing the same thing.
The recruiters have grown accustomed to the badges in a space where all of the students are credentialed equally by Coursera. What seemed to be an asset some years ago is now a baseline. Therefore, in case you want to know why the efforts you put in crafting a good resume should not translate to the success rate you want, it is probably due to the fact that you look just like the very next 200 candidates.
You will have to do more than courses in order to stand out of the noise. You should demonstrate your competence in a contentious, innovative, and pertinent fashion.
Put Projects over Courses
The majority of students believe that the only reasonable thing to do once they have registered in a course is to wait until they receive the final certificate and note it in their CV. However, that is a lost chance. Recruiters are not employing certificates, they are employing ability. That knowledge that you gain is only really good when you can translate that information into something more practical such as an application that is usable or a case study that has some depth.
And, in case you are learning NLP, think of creating a sentiment analysis model that monitors the mood of the society with regard to elections taking place in India in real time. And that is not only technical prowess, it is cultural and contextual sensitivity. A recruiter who notices that will get the impression that the person has the ability to think outside the book.
A B Tech CSE Data Science student who does this does not merely check off a list he or she also disrupts patterns. That is what companies keep in mind.
Get Down into what you Care about
The other reason of most profiles being almost the same is that they are generic in nature. Students prefer to choose the most trending topics, tools, and datasets. But in the process they become virtually indistinguishable.
This can be inverted by letting your work be based on an industry or area of interest. Imagine that you are a finance enthusiast. It is not enough to create a stock price predictor, but you should explain why you decided to use one specific algorithm instead of others and how such a model might affect trading behavior. In case you are interested in the field of public health, you can use real COVID-19 data to chart danger areas and provide local policymakers with some value.
It is this combination of curiosity and application that allows you to become special, and not the richness of the stack.
Build in Public: The Differentiation Hack
Building in public is one of the quickest ways of differentiating yourself. It is a tendency when developers and data scientists post their work, learning process and even errors on such platforms as GitHub, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
Designers do not even need to be the best coders or content creators. Simply tell people what you are doing, why you are doing it and what you are learning. Took a crack at a dirty dataset this week- got a buttload of encoding problems. A potential recruiter will likely learn that you are reflective, engaged, and improving, because you say, I used Pandas.apply() to fix them.
It is a culture that most Indian students, particularly in B Tech CSE Data Science, still feel reluctant about making their work public. That doubt is your advantage. When you make yourself visible, you send a message to employers that you not only learn but you develop in a deliberate way.
Think Again About What Extra Really Is
Students tend to call side projects or writing a blog as extra. However, in the current job market, ordinary is out and extra is in. The recruiters are exhausted with the number of applicants that have undergone an identical series of courses, and have participated in equally identical webinars. What they hunger now is a candidate that took the time to play around with an exotic application, or solve a small local problem or wrote a blog post that makes an obscure idea dead simple.
As an example, a person making use of the local data on water supply to make their usage efficient in a smart home is going to attract more attention than one completing a smart home course. The practical feel of these things helps you learn the subject that is practical and real.
Final Thoughts
You can get the desire to continue stacking the courses and you hope that the next one will fill in the gap in your profile. However, to truly stand out, it requires you to stop fitting in and start doing something that signifies your personality.
Courses will be just great as a starting point, however, it is not the distinguishing characteristic. The game changer is the action you take on them.
That is why before enrolling to another tutorial or certificate, you need to listen to yourself and say will this make me different or just another of the same? That answer determines the future of your career in B Tech CSE Data Science.