Kshira Saagar
Director of data science, THE ICONIC and Global Fashion Group
“The main reason I fell in love with STEM were two amazingly wonderful teachers in my high school – one each for maths and physics. Typically known as the boring subjects or the hard subjects that are too dry, these two amazing souls made every single class so interesting and enlightening, that people would actually look forward to both classes.
“The favourite aspect/trait that I learnt from my Maths teacher was how to appreciate the physical and real world applications of mathematics in everything we see around us – be it differential calculus, algebra or even trigonometry! For example, with trigonometry, we’d be told all the interesting stories on how the pioneers measured Mt Everest and more, and how we could do that too if we learnt the fundamentals ourselves.
Kshira is director of data science at THE ICONIC, although he prefers the title “person who works with data.”
“From my physics teacher, I learnt how to meld the academic world from school books to principles in real life. He’d always take the opportunity to delve into the philosophy of each experiment, each physical phenomenon and even the process of discovering new scientific phenomena. The best example I remember is when he taught us how to appreciate infinity as a concept and how it was completely relative – in the context of an atom 1mm is infinity, whereas in the context of a human being 100 million meters and more seemed like infinity.
“Looking back, I realised that the two aspects of learning and loving STEM are understanding the physical/real-world phenomena behind things, and more importantly being able to apply that to every day living and thinking. Thanks to my wonderful teachers who have helped me get deeper into STEM.”