A few days ago, Stratio asked if anyone from the Numa Team wanted to write about this exciting experience. Rather than writing about it alone, we preferred to sit together and mix our thoughts and feelings about our journey through Stratio – Because we are all equals and one of the main values we are learning about here at Stratio is team work.
Numa is Stratio’s innovative educational center in all things Big Data & AI. The name derives from No-University, No-Master because that’s what it intends to be: A disruptive method of learning that does not follow the usual academic rules and aims to nurture the talent of its participants to prepare them for the professional world.
Why did you apply to join Numa?
When we first heard about Stratio and visited its company website, what struck us was the fact that it was a pioneering Big Data company with its main office in Spain. We have all been interested in Big Data for a while now and we were surprised and pleased to find a company based in Madrid. Stratio also uses the most up-to-date technologies, that are very innovative today and we are all very interested in learning about these.
A special mention to the work values of the company is a must: Make mistakes, Try new things, Dream big, Work hard, Be nice to people, Help each other, Be a team player, Laugh out loud, Play fair, Do the right thing.
At first, they seemed too good to be true. But these values are a core part of daily life at Stratio and are as real as anything! We think that being comfortable at work is as important as having a good salary, in some cases even more important. It has been a very positive experience to see a company that sticks to its values even when it grows to over 300 members of staff.
The idea of dedicating some weeks to learning before incorporating the workforce was a big deal because most of us are recent graduates and this will be our first work experience.
What is different to a usual master’s program?
For us, the main difference about Numa is the practical nature of the course, the immediate application of knowledge and the flexibility that the program offers. During traditional master courses at university, we had to stick to the traditional curricula chosen by the head of department (that sometimes didn’t match the knowledge that the teachers wanted to share or even real-world problems). When you tried to suggest something different or to move away from an out-dated technology on to a new one (so many hours programming in assembler…), it was usually impossible to modify a subject.
It’s great to have the opportunity to learn about what you really want to and to be able to put it all into practice. We have the extra motivation that every technology we are learning in Numa will be applied in a near future at StratioBD.
What have you covered so far?
Even though the project has only just started, we have already had a number of modules which have provided us with an in-depth knowledge of the culture and philosophy of Stratio, its product, its organization, methodology and of course our colleagues. All this just in the first week!
During the second week, we started with more technical modules, such as JIRA, MAVEN, AWS and so on. We are facing the coming weeks with mixed feelings because we are going to start with Scala. Though we are very enthusiastic about it, we are also a bit frightened!
Would you recommend someone to apply to Numa?
At this point, we all have someone in our minds that we think would thoroughly enjoy Numa and the Stratio experience. We think this no-master’s is a great opportunity to get close to a new way of working in a progressive way.
