On October 7, 2026, the PCCE ACM Student Chapter (2026–27) successfully hosted its formal Installation Ceremony followed by an insightful technical talk titled “Data Engineering Around Us: Real-World Systems, Roles and Career Paths” at the Padre Conceicao College of Engineering (PCCE) auditorium in Verna, Goa.

The event commenced at 2:00 p.m. with an opening address by Ms. Ruth Pires. Faculty sponsor Dr. Louella Colaco officially introduced and inducted the newly appointed office bearers for the upcoming term. The new committee members—Om Mayekar (Chair), Siddhant Naik (Vice Chair), Trosten D’Souza (Secretary), Vedant Parab (Treasurer), Arya Bandodkar (Webmaster), and Rhea Fernandes (Membership Chair)—took their official oaths, pledging to fulfill their respective responsibilities.

Following the ceremony, Chief Guest Mr. Mashayikh Shaikh, a PCCE alumnus and currently a Senior Software Engineer at Zimetrics, was welcomed with a floral bouquet by Prof. Meghana Pai Kane. Mr. Shaikh then delivered a comprehensive technical session designed to introduce students to the field of data engineering. Using Swiggy’s scale of 100,000 live orders per minute as a practical example, he contrasted software engineering’s focus on transactional, operational systems with data engineering’s processing of massive datasets.

He detailed scaling methodologies, explaining how tools like Apache Spark process large 100 GB datasets efficiently across distributed worker nodes compared to single-machine limits. He contrasted Hadoop’s high-latency, disk-based architecture with Spark’s rapid in-memory processing capabilities. Furthermore, he introduced mainstream cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), Databricks, and laid out a structured technology roadmap highlighting Python, SQL, Apache Airflow, Vector Databases, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems.

After differentiating between roles like Data Platform and AI/ML engineers, the event concluded with an interactive Q&A session and a final vote of thanks delivered by Ms. Arya Bandodkar.