Nepal In Data "Student Outlook": Raju Puri
Raju Puri is pursuing a Master of Finance and Control (MFC) at the School of Management of Tribhuvan University. He likes doing research on economic and financial issues, for which he needs to search for data in order to better understand the finance and economic context of Nepal.
What are the challenges while having research in financial sector?
The most challenging task while searching for data is to identify, where to find particular data. While doing research in financial sector, I personally am more interested in the manufacturing sector. However, I am hardly able to find the data of manufacturing sector such as lumber, wood, pulp production and so on. As a result, I am not able to figure out the actual outcome at the micro level. Even while searching in different government websites for secondary data, I am not able to find out the appropriate information. If lucky, I find the secondary data, but then usually the data is not periodically updated so it becomes outdated. On the other hand, during the collection of primary information on the financial sector, very few respondents provide reliable information, which is challenging while doing research.
What do you see as the main challenge of Nepal’s education system in terms of training students to use and analyze data?
Nepal’s education system is based on theory not practical education. Most students already graduated from higher education, but they don’t know what data means and how data can help to conduct analysis in a particular sector. During the process of analysis, we can use professional tools such as SPSS, Excel, Stata. Unfortunately, students are not able to use such kind of tools for analysis due to the lack of training about tools.
What kind of tools do you use to analyze data? How did you learn to use the tools?
For my research in the financial and economic sectors and for the analysis of data, I generally use SPSS and Excel. Since I graduated from high school I have been using excel tools for basic analysis and even took excel training from institutions. On the other hand, I started using SPSS from master level by taking SPSS classes. As I am passionate about research, use Google and YouTube as well to expand my learning.
How does data help you to make financial decisions?
From my experience, data provides the most powerful empirical evidence base and serves as the back bone for decision making. We have Management Information Systems with data that help me to take the right decision and manage information regarding different indicators. In the financial sector, we have to buy and sell funds. Therefore, data helps me in making decisions about as how, where and when to use funds a proper manner. Most of the time, there are limited financial resources available, but data helps me to get maximum benefit out of them.
What is your future plan, do you think that Nepal in data portal will help you to make better visualization in your sector?
My dream is to work at financial institutions such as banks and insurance companies etc. Thus, in the future, data will likely be of great importance to me to help me to take right financial decisions. In our country, Nepal in Data is the most powerful portal that I have ever found with the presence of a big data bank with various indicators and visualization tools. For better visualizations,we need graphs, maps, charts, line charts and all these can be found on the portal. In an easy way, I can use and extract data on the financial sector with no cost in short period of time. It has been very helpful in my day to day work.
What do you see as the future of data?
Today’s generation is demanding information a concise format and is not interested in reading long reports or publications. To overcome this problem, data is the most powerful tool to present information. Data is the future!
