The Proof is in the Experience: Naga Sathwik Reddy Gona 

Naga Sathwik Reddy Gona is a proud May 2026 graduate, having earned a Master’s degree in Data Science and Business Analytics.

Experience at unc charlotte

Naga’s journey was shaped by personal determination and the curiosity to grow in a rapidly evolving field. With a strong passion for Data Science and UNC Charlotte providing an education in the data field, choosing UNC Charlotte was not difficult for Naga. 

“When I was choosing programs, three things kept pulling me toward UNC Charlotte. First, the MS in Data Science and Business Analytics is housed within the School of Data Science, a dedicated home for the field. Second, the curriculum refused to pick a lane, so I could build a whole map without locking myself into one specialty before I knew which one fit. Lastly, Charlotte itself. The tech and financial ecosystem here means the coursework consistently brushes up against real problems rather than staying theoretical.”

With a strong appreciation for bridging the gap between coursework and real-world experience, Naga reflected on how his passion for data science developed and how Charlotte offered a glimpse into his future career path.

“I came to UNC Charlotte, already drawn to data science, but the moment really crystallized for me was the 23XI Business Analytics Challenge. It is a collaborative initiative between the School of Data Science’s Sports Analytics program and 23XI Racing. Our team got to take on the kind of problem actual race engineers face. We analyzed the data, found the angle, proposed a solution, and walked through it the way a team inside the organization would. Sitting with a real problem, inside a real organization, around people whose decisions depend on the analysis. That was the moment data science stopped being the field I was studying and started being the work I wanted to do. “

Naga’s journey has shown how you can learn from your own experience and from the experiences of impactful professors. Throughout Naga’s journey, two professors stood out during Naga’s time as a Niner. 

“Dr. Archit Parnami is a rare combination of practitioner and teacher, someone who actively builds in the LLM space and teaches it with the same seriousness. His course gave us an honest, end-to-end view of what it really takes to build with LLMs, from transformers and prompt engineering through fine-tuning, RAG agents, evaluation, and deployment. Dr. Ilieva Ageenko taught the capstone that pulled every thread of the program together. Under her guidance, I learned to navigate a real industry project from start to finish, framing the problem, aligning stakeholders, and getting to implementation. Her decades of executive leadership grounded every discussion in how data works inside an organization.”

College is a time of growth and exploration, and allowing yourself to shine and become aware of a new part of yourself that you did not know was possible when you started your collegiate career. Naga was very honest and open about who he has become since starting this journey at UNC Charlotte.

“I arrived in Charlotte two years ago with two suitcases and the conviction that studying abroad was worth the leap. It demanded more than I anticipated, and I would make the same choice again. What I did not know about myself before was how much patience I have when things get hard. Moving from Hyderabad to the United States piled a lot on top of the coursework: cultural shock, learning to manage my own time and health for the first time, and navigating things I never had to before. I came in expecting to learn data science. The biggest lesson was how to keep moving through hard seasons without losing direction. My perspective is genuinely broader now, and that is the part that has stayed with me most.”

After graduating, Naga is working through his personal portfolio while pursuing full-time roles in data science, machine learning, applied AI, analytics engineering, and business intelligence.

“Everything I build runs on infrastructure I own. The policy, RAG Assistant, the Bowtie risk analytics system, and the dashboards are all self-hosted on a Linux server I set up, served through Cloudflare tunnels, containerized with Docker, and gated by CI and a real test suite.”

Final advice

Naga is enjoying the full experience that Charlotte has to offer, even outside the classroom. 

“Outside of coursework, I love exploring Charlotte. I have also made a point of traveling around the US whenever I get the chance because my time here is finite, and I want to see as much as I can. Uptown Charlotte became home in a way I did not expect. Every class I took, every problem set, every walk between buildings happened here.”

A final piece that Naga wanted to share with incoming students comes from his experience of a journey that was filled with evaluation, building, and transformation. 

“Build something every semester that you could not have built the semester before. Pick bigger projects than your coursework. Put them on GitHub even when they are ugly. Classes give you the vocabulary, projects give you the proof, and proof is what people remember.”