As we continue to bring you stories about the graduates from the Information Quality Graduate Program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, it is our great pleasure to introduce you to Mary Aruna Gadde. Mary completed her Master of Science in Information Quality (MSIQ) in May 2015.
Mary is originally from India. She lived mostly in the region of Hyderabad where her family still resides. She received a Bachelor of Science and a Post Graduate Diploma in Bioinformatics from Sri Krishnadevaraya University. Before coming to the U.S., Mary started her career working with Virtusa, then later Mindtree (2010-2013) in India. Mindtree is serving prestigious clients mostly in banking and healthcare sectors on data warehouse testing and currently in the Retail Marketing sector as well.
Mary found out about the UALR Information Quality Graduate Program while she was working as a data warehouse tester. While searching for Big Data through the web, she came across the UALR Information Quality website. There she discovered that most of the courses offered in our program were related to her field, something she could not find at other universities. The UALR curriculum also addressed the latest trends in the field of data analysis. Her next step was to contact Dr. John R. Talburt, the Coordinator for the UALR Information Quality Graduate Program, who guided her from the beginning until the end of her degree.
During her tenure in the program, Mary was a full-time student attending classes on the Little Rock campus. The courses she took helped her to improve her technical skills. She told us that she cannot consider any of the courses to be her favorite course. She considered every course to be unique and designed to give the students the chance to know more about the latest technologies and industry trends. “I had a great time studying and learning in all of the courses including my elective courses. The courses are designed to give an introduction to the field of Information Quality (IQ) followed by in-depth look into IQ tools, IQ policies, strategies and other advanced topics. The coursework included assignments, case studies, and projects. All of this together made my time at UALR very memorable.”
After being graduated from UALR, Mary took a position with Silicon Valley Bank in California as the Quality Assurance (QA) Lead. Her work was focused on online banking applications with an emphasis on data analysis. Since January 2016, she has been working for the IT services and business and technology consulting company Wipro as a QA Lead. One of the major clients of Wipro is the world’s largest retailer Walmart, where she is working on Big data, Hadoop, SAP Hana, and other technologies. Wipro Technologies is an IT consulting company and it’s a vendor for Walmart. Walmart uses e-commerce and Big Data analysis to increase the company’s sales.
As a QA Lead working on the Next Generation Pricing project for Walmart, her work includes verifying and processing competitor data obtained using Hadoop, Sqoop, Hive, SAP Hana, Spark & Kafka Frameworks, Oozie workflow, and other Big Data applications. The processed data is moved to different modules using a graphical user interface (GUI) and later moved to pricing analysts. The MSIQ courses that Mary found most useful in her current job include data analysis, IQ techniques, IQ tools, and IQ policies and strategies.
“I would like to thank all my professors for providing a very high quality education. I had the privilege of taking several courses with Dr. Talburt, Dr. Pierce and Dr. Agarwal. I am so grateful for their guidance and for setting clear learning objectives for their students. I would also like to thank my parents for their support and encouragement during my studies. I do thank my friends and classmates for nurturing a healthy competitive environment while we were working on selecting a topic for our projects, during brainstorm sessions on analysis or assignments, long study nights at UALR library, and the list goes on.”
As for her advice for other IQ Students: “IQ courses are designed to introduce the latest concepts, principles and research in our field with a special concentration on data. The professors are very cooperative and give their complete attention to students. IQ students in the UALR program are very fortunate to have such great mentors who are always available for them. I have updated my resume and included the project courses I studied. I could see that most of the job interview calls I receive are because of these projects and the subjects I studied. You can make the best decision by joining the program. I wish you all the best!”
Established in 2006 by the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology (EIT) in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Program, the UALR Information Quality Graduate Program is dedicated to promoting state of the art curriculum in information quality education, contributing new ideas to the information quality knowledge base, and establishing information quality partnerships with the community, government, and industry. The Program’s Master’s Degree has recently been ranked by College Choice as one of 50 Best Online Master’s Degrees in Information Technology Programs.
