Techie Stories: Fatma Öztas’s Journey on Connecting the dots in Chemistry to form a pattern
Ever wondered how Chemistry, Battery analysis, Natural Language Processing and building Websites can all seamlessly come together? In this article, we hear about the experience of our Techie Fatma Öztas who completed our Digital Shaper program in both the Data Science and Web Development tracks though she is doing her Master’s in the natural science field!
TechLabs Marketing (Abhishek): Thanks for taking the time for this interview Fatma, can you give us a brief introduction about yourself and also your previous coding experience?
Fatma Öztas: I have completed my Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Universität zu Köln and am currently pursuing my Master’s degree in Chemistry with a focus on Physical Chemistry from RWTH Aachen. During one of my internships, I had to carry out numerous battery analysis experiments to record parameters like current, voltage and many others. Though I enjoyed executing these experiments, the part with respect to evaluating the result data was something I never looked forward to. I had to carry out repetitive steps in excel to plot the results and doing them hundreds of times was just tiresome.
It was during this stage that I tried to automate the entire process which got me interested in coding. I spend a lot of time trying to understand how to get the data into the program, select the ones I need and then create required plots. I think it took me more time to write this entire code than if I was to do it manually. But the feeling I got when you could just click a button to get everything done in seconds was really exhilarating!
TechLabs Marketing: Why did you want to take part in the TechLabs program?
Fatma Öztas: Though I was able to start writing my own programs to help me overcome mundane tasks, I wanted to learn more strategically. I had realized by then that Python was super useful for numerical analysis and that is where I wanted to deep dive in. Also, I used to always come across these flyers of Hackathons that I always wanted to take part in but I wasn’t really sure about my skills and hence let them slide by. It was during this time that I heard about TechLabs Aachen and decided that it would be worth a try.
TechLabs Marketing: Can you tell us more about the Data Science project that you worked on?
Fatma Öztas: Our project was related to AI-Powered Speech Recognition and Sentiment Analysis where we determine and compare the speech recognition accuracy and performance of Google Cloud API and Descript while also integrating a sentiment analysis. I chose to work on this project as it was related to Natural Language Processing (NLP) which I have been really interested in and feel has a lot of potential to increase the efficiency of research work.
For example, I find it very time-consuming to read through hundreds of research papers to find out the electrolyte type, name of separator, material and other related parameters in battery analysis. Using NLP, you can maybe dump all the research papers into a folder and then export a CSV with all the relevant data you need!
(You can read the Project report here)
TechLabs Marketing: After completing the Data Science Track, we see our Techies usually opt for the Artificial Intelligence Track. But you chose to do Web Development, what motivated you?
Fatma Öztas: After completing the Data Science Track, I was much more confident of my skills since I had a more structured learning approach due to the wonderful course designed by TechLabs. Though I was inclined to proceed with AI, I figured that Web Development would be something much nicer and useful for me as it would help me create a platform to display all the projects that I was working on. This interest in creating a nice web platform to share my work with others is what made me opt for the Web Development track.
During the project phase, I was part of the team working on creating a platform for discovering events and places to meet up in Aachen. I worked mainly on the backend of things since I was already very familiar and liked working with databases.
(You can read the Project report here)
TechLabs Marketing: How was your overall experience being a Techie?
Fatma Öztas: For me, it was a super enriching experience. Not only in terms of learning but also in terms of the people that you get to meet and work with. Since I am from a natural science course, I would maybe not have met students from Medicine, Economies if not for having worked on the projects.
Moreover, we have access to amazing mentors who are really willing to explain and teach you basic as well as very intricate things. In the AI project, though we were just 2–3 members, our meetings were around two hours long since our mentor was always motivated to share some interesting insights. During the Web Dev project, our team was much bigger and needed a lot of collaboration between the frontend and backend. Our mentor managed this really well and made sure that we were also having fun.
The whole concept of TechLabs is something that helped me connect the dots between so many different aspects and get a wonderful pattern in the end. This further motivated me to go ahead and be a part of the organization team too and I am glad of doing so.
Inspired by Fatma’s journey and looking for a platform to start learning to code? Then apply for our Digital Shaper program!
