This university student hopes to help other young Indian women pursue technology careers after honing her AI and ML skills.
Vani Agarwal grew up only 30 miles outside of Delhi, India. Moving from her hometown of Hasanpur (population 83,000) to the capital region of more than 32 million people for school was a huge deal for her and her family, aboutamazon revealed.
“I stepped out of my comfort zone,” Agarwal said of her move to Delhi to pursue a computer science degree. “It was overwhelming at first. Growing up, we could not get any computers or laptops, and there was no exposure to technological careers. I felt like I was really far behind.”
It wasn’t until the pandemic struck that Agarwal got the quiet time she needed to boost her confidence and feel more at ease in her studies. This is also when she became aware of machine learning (ML)—and an AWS AI & ML Scholarship program that would allow her to delve deeper into the subject.
In 2022, the AWS AI & ML Scholarship program, in collaboration with Udacity, provided access to the AI Programming with Python Udacity Nanodegree, a project and skills-based education credential program, to 2,000 underrepresented and underserved students. The four-month virtual program provides students with a foundation in artificial intelligence (AI) fundamentals as well as exposure to the types of real-world problems that machine learning (ML) solves.
The program’s access to study sessions and conversations with industry mentors gave Agarwal clarity on how to focus her future studies.
“Without the AWS AI & ML Scholarship program, I wouldn’t have gotten this deep into AI,” Agrawal said. “The field is so intimidating. It can be scary to dip your toes into it. The program definitely pushed my boat into those deep waters.”
The project-based learning approach of the scholarship program also provided Agarwal with the practice she needed to pass her technical interview for another opportunity—a software development engineer internship with Amazon Music. She got the internship last fall, and she’s been exploring a new big city—Bangalore, India, where her new job is located—since January.
Agarwal spends time mentoring young women on their professional futures as she plans her next steps after her internship and graduation. She frequently converses with others who come from small towns like hers and are looking for advice on how to further their studies.
“I constantly try to go out and talk to girls who are confused about what to do in life,” Agarwal said. “It gives me satisfaction when someone tells me about their goals and I can affirm them, because I did not get that affirmation myself.”
Here are three top tips Agarwal shares with students seeking careers in technology:
- Keep your resume updated and typo free. “I advise my mentees to always keep their resume clean and up to date,” Agarwal said. “Your resume represents you. Even before you go to the interview, the hiring manager or the recruiter looks at your resume and decides if they are going to consider you or not. Your resume is very important.”
- Apply, apply, apply—and be open to feedback. Agarwal recommends applying for any job that remotely strikes an interest. Even if you don’t land a specific role, “it’s always a good experience getting feedback from a recruiter because that feedback helps you to see your mistakes and improve on them.”
- Seek out new opportunities by learning new skills. “It’s very important to be up to date on whatever trends are going on in the particular technology field you are working in, so you are not stumped when someone asks you a question,” Agarwal said. “As a software engineer, you should always be open to working on technologies you haven’t worked on before. That’s how you grow.”