Meet some of our outstanding ITWS graduate students making a difference at RPI and around the world. Click on their names to learn more about them and why they chose the MS IT program at RPI.

Chirag Sahni, MS IT Spring '22
Concentration Data Science and Analytics
Tell us a bit about yourself and your IT background. During my undergraduate program at Manipal University in India in 2018, I had an opportunity to work with Impetus Technologies as a Big Data Intern for six months. After graduating from Manipal University, the internship led me to accept a full-time job offer at the same company and I worked as a Software Engineer in the domain of big data for around three years. I am also an outdoor sports and movie enthusiast.
Why did you choose to attend the ITWS program at RPI? The wide spectrum of courses available in this program along with exceptional resources and experienced faculty persuaded me to choose the ITWS graduate program at the RPI.
What kinds of research projects have you undertaken at RPI? One of my initial projects under Professor Thilanka Munasinghe was in collaboration with NASA to determine the vulnerability of healthcare facilities across the US against the high amount of rainfall and other forms of precipitation using machine learning. And currently, I am working on a project with them to determine the effect of severe winds on the power grids across the southeastern US.
Tell us about being a TA in the ITWS program. My experience as a TA for Web Development courses under Dr. Callahan has been a fabulous one as it has consisted of numerous individual growth and learning opportunities. TA’ing has been a lot of fun, but it is also a serious part-time job to make sure the students are getting the most out of the course. Being on the other side has given me a new perspective and made me appreciate the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to ensure everyone gets the best education at RPI.
Tell us about your summer internship. I got an internship with IBM in Summer 2021 during which I developed an open-source library (RASL) of relational algebra (RA) operators for scikit-learn (SL). This library of mine can create end-to-end ML pipelines with integrated data pre-processing techniques using Pandas and PySpark. Our team also published this work in the NeurIPS 2021 engineering conference. Publishing your research work at the NeurIPS conference is every graduate student’s dream and I feel privileged that I was able to do so in my time at RPI.
What have been some of your favorite classes and class experiences at RPI? I’ve had immense learning opportunities from all the classes I have taken so far at RPI, but Data Analytics and Data Science gave me an opportunity to work with NASA and learn more in the world of Data Science. It really helped me discover new and innovative ways of thinking when undertaking a challenge.
Tell us about grad student life, from your experience. Life as a Grad Student at RPI really puts your work and student life at a test. It always challenges you to manage time and energy effectively and efficiently. The course load is also significantly more demanding from reading and writing assignments to potential research work. But all the work you do in the ITWS program pays off in that it yields myriad benefits like networking opportunities and gives you opportunities to apply skills and experience in real world scenarios.
What advice would you give to prospective graduate students considering the ITWS program at RPI? If you want to build your career in the world of Information Technology, then the ITWS graduate program at the RPI is really the one to look forward to as it will cater to you with an amazing launchpad for a bright and successful corporate career.
What's next for you after graduation? I still have one semester left in my program but the comprehensiveness of the ITWS graduate program is such that it has already helped me fetch a wonderful full time opportunity at EAB as a Senior Data Engineer.

Megha Singh Rajpoot, MS IT Fall '22, ITWS Student Leadership Graduate Representative
Concentration Data Analytics
Tell us a bit about yourself and your IT background.

Being an early morning person, I love to go on long walks, I enjoy doing evening Yoga, cooking my favorite Indian recipes, painting, riding motorbikes, listening to music specially a blend of genres involving electronic music, jazz, blues, and soul.

I have worked as a software engineer for 6 years in the IT industry back in India, Pune for three different multinational companies across various verticals. Majorly, my work involved dealing with client-side and product pipeline deployments, management and testing for major releases. Over these years I am very passionate about learning newer technologies that are being adopted at the workplace and skills needed to support the same. I believe there is lot of room for self-development and refine my technical skills as former software engineer.

In my previous experience, I have achieved various accolades from different clients in terms of project delivery including: Winner of Nokia do good hackathon in 2013, Kudos from Cognizant best performance award in 2015, Best performer in Cybage for a Singapore client-based team in 2017 followed by an early promotion, and Best performer in terms of handling most critical functionalities in Xoriant 2020.

Why did you choose to attend the ITWS program at RPI? I decided to join Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to pursue master’s in ITWS program which is flexible enough to choose the subjects of my interests such as Database Applications, Data Analytics, Machine Learning. Along with that, RPI is highly regarded among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity" in computation and information technology.
What kinds of research projects have you undertaken at RPI? I am currently involved in a data analytics project related to a critical infrastructure project for NASA, in which I am predicting a risk index for the Aircraft facilities depending on various factors.
Tell us about being a TA in the ITWS program.

Being a Teaching Assistant is lot of fun but it is also a serious part-time job. It requires good amount of work each week to stay on top of material and make sure that the students are getting the most from the course. I try to make sure that each student is having best learning experience possible. There is nothing more rewarding when I notice the smile on their faces when they finally receive expected outputs. It also helps me review the material and understand it at a deeper level.

Beyond having a great experience at teaching, I have been bought into an amazing community of meticulous, intellectual, and generous students. I am so grateful to Prof. Goldschmidt and Prof. Sturman for giving me this opportunity. Through this I have received a new perspective towards my professors, and it made me appreciate how much work goes on behind the scenes for each class.

What have been some of your favorite classes and class experiences at RPI? All the subjects that I have chosen, have helped to strengthen my technical skills and previous work experience. It’s difficult for me to choose a favorite, however I can cite few of the best moments as an RPI graduate student. Case study on the live project in Database and application class led me to interact with the development team at Google and understand their application in depth. I enjoyed my BIES midterm case study on Netflix. Lastly, working on the NASA critical infrastructure project has exposed me to different machine learning and AI models.
Tell us about grad student life, from your experience. It is exciting to be part of RPI graduate experience. Everything is fun and have its own learning curve. Each day I try to learn something new in my life.
What advice would you give to prospective graduate students considering the ITWS program at RPI? The student-faculty ratio at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is 14:1. Hence, you will not get a feeling of a small fish in a big pond. ITWS program’s flexibility to choose core and elective subjects from its pool of courses is remarkable. Professors in ITWS program are extremely supportive they go beyond their call of duty in terms of helping students and holding office hours. They know their materials inside out and are exceptionally skilled in terms of teaching them.

Devanshoo Jain, MS IT Spring '22
Concentration Data Science and Analytics
Tell us a bit about yourself and your IT background. I come from a very diverse background and until now my experience has been varied comprising of both the technical and business aspects of the real world. I graduated with a dual degree integrated course (5 Years) from NMIMS University, Mumbai, India with a Bachelor’s in Electronics and Telecommunications and MBA in Finance. This course gave me a comprehensive sense of the real world with knowledge and a holistic understanding of how technology and business are amalgamated. Before coming to RPI, I worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers as a Management Consultant/ Associate and gained a good amount of business consulting experience. Most of my projects were related to digital transformation and involved handling huge amounts of data, which further motivated me to enrich my technical knowledge especially in the field of IT and Data Science. Thus I decided to join Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in its prestigious ITWS program.
Why did you choose to attend the ITWS program at RPI? The ITWS program is a well reputed program with great experienced faculty. I specifically chose this program because of the flexible coursework. When I first went through the course catalogue, I found many courses which interests me and several concentrations to choose from. Since I had prior industry experience I was looking for a strong but concise course plan which could help me boost up my technical skills.
What kinds of research projects have you undertaken at RPI? I worked mainly 2 projects as part of my final class projects in the Data Analytics and X-Informatics course. In my Data Analytics class I worked to determine the Vulnerability Index of Health Care Facilities in the US using Python and Machine Learning (Ongoing). We leveraged NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Program and Homeland Security Foundation-Level Infrastructure data to determine facilities which are most vulnerable in cases of natural disasters caused by heavy rainfalls. I used clustering models to detect most vulnerable locations based on precipitation and ranked them using a custom but simple algorithm. In another project, I worked in a team to determine the Effect of Dependent Factors on Global Child Mortality. We tried to predict trends in child mortality rates and reports on progress towards the health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and associated targets.
Tell us about being a TA in the ITWS program. I have been a Teaching Assistant to Professor Thilanka Munasinghe for 2 semesters. This has been a very special and an altogether different experience for me. The best part of this experience was solving doubts and queries of students. I will term this as a sensitive responsibility because over the time I realized how important it is to provide support and hand hold students who need it the most. Being a TA, I had to be well versed with the assignments and announcements that professor makes in the class so I had to be super attentive. While grading, I had to be very fair to maintain the integrity and provide unbiased evaluation & feedback to the students. Overall, being a TA enhanced my interpersonal skills and boosted my confidence.
Tell us about your summer internship. My summer internship was with IBM Research. Due to the COVID restrictions the internship was completely remote. I was selected to work with the AI Research team of IBM which focused on Data Labeling. The best part of the internship was that I was given an individual project which was both fascinating and strenuous as I had little experience in AI and machine learning. My responsibility was to change the current system from a fixed size partitioning algorithm to a dynamic algorithm which can eventually help speed up the data labeling process for the users. So my job was to perform an extensive research on dynamic clustering algorithms and determine the best possible one. The internship immensely helped me improve my machine learning skills and also made me realize that AI/ML really interests me, hence I took an advanced course in ML the following semester.
What have been some of your favorite classes and class experiences at RPI? Some of the classes which I really liked are Data Analytics which helped me revise my R concepts, Projects in AI and ML which focused mainly on the deep learning aspects and Statistics for Managerial Decision Making which taught us to use analytical tools like advanced excel, SAS and Tableau for preliminary data analysis.
Tell us about grad student life, from your experience. I found the program slightly demanding, although I could manage my assignments, projects and presentations quiet efficiently still leaving time for having fun. I made lot of friends from my different courses. I really enjoyed the events organized by the the graduate community every alternate weekends, they are really fun and you get to meet and connect with a lot of new students from different fields.
What advice would you give to prospective graduate students considering the ITWS program at RPI? RPI’s ITWS program is an excellent program. With this program you can prepare yourselves for a Software Engineering/ Data Engineering role as well as a Data/ Business Analysts profile depending on the coursework you choose. Graduating from this program will definitely open up a lot of job opportunities for you. The university has a lot of student resources for professional development. Even if you have less experience in CS field, I believe this program can help you garner your technical skills and help you excel in your carrier.