A self-confessed proud Hyderabadi, Sreeja Kamishetty is a final-year dual-degree student who is pursuing her master’s in the machine learning lab under Prof. Praveen Paruchuri, and her main areas of research are artificial intelligence and intelligent transportation. Her work on developing a machine learning solution for prioritised (and better quality) routing of vehicles, especially during emergencies has culminated in a research paper. It has been selected for the annual flagship conference of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (ITSS) which will be held in November at Hawaii, the U.S.
Rare honour
Like many other hopeful peers, 20-year-old Sreeja Kamishetty too applied for an internship at Google last year. She was hoping to have a learning experience from the interview and selection process. Hence, she says she wasn’t particularly disappointed when she didn’t get selected for the internship. But her application didn’t go unnoticed. Sreeja was instead chosen for the Get-Ahead programme for EMEA (short for Europe, Middle East and Africa regions). She was the only Indian selected to attend the retreat in London.
In an endeavour to create awareness of its culture, Google organised a programme called Get-Ahead, where women in tech were invited to workshops and related events. “As a part of the programme, the organisers conducted Kickstart coding competition for all the Get-Ahead participants. The top 20 were selected to the EMEA Google Students Retreat in London,” explains Sreeja. “Like any other Google Kickstart, there were two questions which we needed to answer in two hours. I have been practising coding, which helped me do well in the competition,” she says.
Then there was the EMEA Google Students Retreat 2018 which took place in the first week of August. Ït was a platform for women in tech to strengthen skills, network with other attendees and engineers and learn about Google products and culture, during the course of the three days. Each day had a specific agenda,” elaborates Sreeja. “For example, the first day was dedicated to networking with other scholars. There were talks on Google’s culture, a talk on machine learning in YouTube, and an office tour of beautiful King's Cross office in London. The second day was technical, with code retreat workshops organised by Google employees. On the final day, we had panel discussions on stories of successes and failures, and talked about opportunities at Google.”
For Sreeja, the retreat was a wholesome learning experience which not only boosted her confidence but also helped in her current preparation for job interviews. “There was an activity where we were asked to write different things in which we are remarkable at. At the end of it, the facilitator made us realise that everyone was remarkable,” exclaims Sreeja. Another workshop she fondly remembers is ‘True Colours’. “The workshop left a great impression on me. It taught us how to work with people with different colours, where each colour represented a set of behaviours,” she explains.
