Her Story
About Nishtha
I have been in the utility industry for about two and a half years, working as a Business Intelligence Analyst II with E2 Consulting Engineers for Southern California Edison. My work focuses on automated data pipelines and providing executive-level dashboards and analytical solutions that improve operational decisions. In the utility industry, I focus on high-fire areas and determining where we need to send contractors to ensure areas are cleared out. Over the past few years, I have worked on initiatives that have automated thousands of hours of manual reporting. My focus in business intelligence is eliminating manual reporting effort and improving data accuracy for large-scale operation programs through real-time analytics and reporting. I work extensively with technologies like Python, SQL, Snowflake, and Power BI, and we are also working on introducing AI-driven analytics to create scalable solutions for business leaders and the whole team. My most notable professional achievement by far has been taking sole ownership of the dataset and program that I mainly work on. Back in 2024, when I started working on Southern California Edison's structure data, I realized that the data pipelines were not owned by our team, which caused delays in reporting. I wanted to solve that bottleneck, so I dove in and took ownership. I built an end-to-end data pipeline to extract, transform, and load the data. Since then, we have reduced the reporting time significantly. One main data update that initially took two to three hours now takes only 20 minutes because it is in our ownership. I spearheaded the data strategy for this, and we have reduced automation reporting time by 89%.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Nishtha
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to my education and my family values. My grandfather has instilled the passion in me, where he always used to say, 'You're not just meant for a kitchen. You should think about how you're gonna earn your money, think about how strong you're gonna be physically, mentally, emotionally, and educate yourself as much as you can. And be true to your work that you are doing.' His words have shaped who I am today and driven me to pursue excellence in my career while staying grounded in the values he taught me.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
I'll be honest, I don't think I have ever received any career advice. I have learned and paved through whatever I have seen and experienced in my life. I have learned through that experience rather than from specific advice someone gave me.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
One advice I would like to give to women entering the industry is to be focused on leadership skills as well, and not just technical skills, because I feel that will help brush up your work. Also, be very compassionate towards all your teammates, because I feel at the end of the day, it's not just you as an individual contributor, but the whole team is affected by your work. So developing both your technical abilities and your leadership qualities, while maintaining compassion for your team, is essential for success.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenge would be that people are very scared that AI is taking jobs. But as people in tech, we should think about how we can effectively use AI to automate certain tasks at our job. It's not like AI will take our jobs away, but we have to be really strategic with it and see how it works out for all of us, but also in a very secured way. I know that artificial intelligence can be a little finicky when we work in the data world. So AI is both a challenge and an opportunity that we need to approach thoughtfully and strategically.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
One of the topmost values for me is hard work. Second would be discipline, and it goes hand in hand. When you are very disciplined, you're going to be focused. Discipline is my main thing. Another important value is that you should not be disrespecting to others. If you have done some project, you should not be rude or very flashy about it. You have to be respectful enough to take on constructive criticism. For example, if you have made a dashboard and you think it's perfect, but when you present it, your manager might say you need some work. During those times, I know that people can be affected, but you should be open to that feedback and remain humble.
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