Does your work define you?

Since this is May, I thought I’d write a few posts on our work lives. After all, work is where we spend the most part of our day to day lives.

Today, let me tell you what my work is like. I completed engineering and joined Mu Sigma, one of the core analytics company based out of Bangalore, India. My current project is related to an online travel agency. On a day-to-day basis, I look at the data the client sends us: how much which flight cost and what is the gross profit the client generated etc. We then use that data to build models that can help to predict certain future trends.

The work is interesting, as I am still finding my grips around learning the business. Work pressure is there, of course, but it is healthy. That is to say I don’t end up leaving office past midnight or something.

I have been in this industry not long enough to claim that my work defines me. But my work definitely has given me a lot of opportunities to learn. I have loved coding since college, even though I am not too great in it. We keep having good-code practice measures across the company to ensure we write good codes from which I learnt a lot. I guess this is what job experience does to you – the learnings that you acquire from the work you do leave their impact beyond the four walls of the company you are working for. You learn to value planning and time. At my workplace, we are always under pressure to give our best – if I fail to do all the tasks I plan for in the morning, I realize there has been a planing error. Next time, I try to plan better. There is a corrective force that is always in place.

What about you? Today, tell me what you job experience is like. Do you enjoy doing what you do? Does you work indeed define you? Tell me one challenge that you have faced at work and overcame successfully. I am all eyes to read your responses.

P.S: In case you are not comfortable commenting publicly, you can share your thoughts with me in the Message box below.

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Dear WordPress blogger, what do your search terms say?

Dear blogger,

Have you ever looked at what the search terms on your WordPress blog say?

I have a weird fascination of checking out search terms. I keep going back to the Stats page of my blog, and look at which search terms led viewers to my blog.

This morning, armed with my knowledge of Python, I decided to draw some insights from the search terms. What are the items that are most searched to reach my blog? What does a certain search lead viewers to my blog? These are questions that would help me understand my blog traffic better, and hence plan my blog posts better.

So, I wrote a little code to segregate my search terms and check the frequency of each. Here’s an overview of each:

I find it interesting that most people have reached my blog by doing a search which contained the search term ‘magazine’ or ‘publish’ or ‘short story’. This leads me to believe that my old post about magazines to publish fiction and nonfiction is India is still relevant. I’m glad!

When people are searching for my blog, many search ‘scribbles @ arpita’ as well, so that resulted in a few search terms containing my name. But there were a few really weird search items too, like the one highlighted in the picture below:

Hand-cutting? Blood? OMG, what was the viewer looking for?

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the process of understanding viewer motivations. As you all probably know from an earlier post on my other blog, I love using the skills learnt in office to my day-to-day life. I’m glad I’m finding more and more interesting problems in my real life that I can solve using my newly acquired skills.

Enough about me. Now, to you – have you ever looked at your search terms before? If not, please do. Maybe you’ll note some interesting trends in data, which will lead to to write more reader-oriented posts!