Howdy! Thank you for taking the time to visit my site. My name is Pranav Jain and I am passionate about computer science. I graduated from Texas A&M in 2023 with a B.S. in Computer Science. I am pursuing a M.S. in Computer Science at Columbia University to build my skills to become a successful ML engineer.
Since I was young, I have always enjoyed building stuff. In middle school, I would spend my weekends following build tutorials by Steve Spangler and Kip Kay on Youtube. In high school, I took the game design and robotics courses offered by my high school. This passion for making led me to explore programming in my senior year of high school through udemy and coursera. I found programming fascinating because I could create incredible projects solely with my computer. After taking another programming class in my freshman year at Texas A&M, I was certain that I wanted to focus on computer science in my future career. This led me to pursue computer science as my college major.
During my time at Texas A&M, I had lots of fun. I loved learning about computer science theory from my professors. With my discrete mathematics professor Dr. Carlisle, I delved into the world of mathematical logic, learning how to prove mathematical statements in clever and intuitive ways. With my computer organization professor, Dr. Tyagi, I started with simple logic gates and built up to an entire computer. I also loved putting the computer science theory into practice in summer internships. At Takeda and Capital One, I enjoyed developing software projects that helped others at the company to work more efficiently. I also loved sharing my computer science knowledge with my peers. At Aggie Coding Club, I developed and presented beginner-friendly workshops to teach valuable coding skills, such as git, web scraping, and react. Within a seminar class, I delivered presentations on how to obtain and be successful at an internship. Lastly, I loved my computer science peers and my professors. With my peers, I enjoyed discussing different areas of computer science and collaborating on class projects and hackathons. In office hours, my professors always made their best effort to answer questions I had regarding computer science topics and would also be interested in learning about my future career.
Currently, I am pursing a masters at Columbia University to build my skills to become a successful ML engineer. In short, an ML engineer is focused on shipping a product using ML. In detail, an ML engineer sources and cleans data, chooses an ML model for the data, trains and tests a model with the data, deploys a well-performing model, connects the model to data sources, monitors the model, and retrains the model if necessary. A nice video about this career can be found here. I decided on this job during my winter break from 2023-2024 for several reasons. Firstly, I enjoy programming, working with ML models, working with databases, and deploying and monitoring products. Secondly, I like that there is a high demand and low supply of ML engineers and that the pay of ML engineers is often quite high (check out this video for more information). After my masters, I plan to enter the workforce and take on job roles that will build my skills so I eventually become an ML engineer.