Priyanka K.

I am so happy to share my story and I am so glad to be a part of College of Information. The scholarships offered by this department are very helpful for the students to get financially better.
I am an International Student and from India. I have joined UNT in Spring-2020 in the stream of Data Science. I came to U.S in January 2020. Everything went well for the first two months, and I was so excited to see U.S and its culture. But after that, in March, suddenly the pandemic COVID-19 started. Everything got shut down even the on-campus jobs and started financially lower. Actually, I am from a middle-class family and my father is a small business holder. We are five members in the family. My parents have three daughters. It is difficult to grow girls in India as there will be many expenses for girls. My father was only the person to earn. But due to this pandemic, business got shut down and it became very difficult to survive. I was very stressed and started searching for scholarships and finally, I found this departmental scholarship.
 
After looking into the requirements, I thought I was the best match for it. Basically, I have always been very good at academics from my childhood. I participated in many national wide competitive exams and got merit certificate in most of the exams. As I come from middle-class family, my parents don't have money to spend on my bachelor's education, so I earned a total fee amount of scholarship for bachelor's from my state government. The scholarship is awarded to the students who get rank in EAMCET below 10,000. EAMCET is an entrance test for bachelor's education. I got 6089 rank among 500K students. My love towards MATH helps me to get 158 in Quant of GRE and also to get money for my expenses by tutoring Math to the school students. I did many projects related to Python, Data Visualizations, SAS, MySQL, SAS Enterprise Miner, C and Java.
 
By considering all the requirements, I asked letter of recommendation from Professor. Wang, Guonan and from Student Computer Lab Manager - Jared, Countryman. They provided me the letter of Recommendations and I am very thankful to them.
 
As I am an International student, due to this scholarship and general scholarship, I got in-state tuition waiver. It really helps me to get better financially. It offset some of the costs and reduced my workload as a whole. From then, I am concentrating on my studies without any distractions, and I am learning new technologies.
 
This is one of the achievements in my life. As a part of Data Science, I have learned many tools which are helpful for my career.