Photo by Lucian Alexe on Unsplash
Being the first batch in Sydney that starts training in lockdown, I had some trepidation of how the live classes would be on zoom. I found the classes to be well planned, the course content was very informative, and the Data School coaches were quite supportive.
Day 1
The first week in Data School lived up to its name with being hectic. I was introduced to the team at Data School and my cohort DSAU10. My cohort has a mix of academic /work backgrounds ranging from marketing and economics to telecommunications. With such varied experience, I am looking forward to a good exchange of ideas and rich learning.
The training spans 16 weeks and then in placements with client location for 2 years. The courses will build a firm foundation in Tableau and Alteryx. Apart from these tools, there is an introduction to soft skills, python and specific topics on data. We aim to get certified in Alteryx and Tableau at the end of the training.
Tryst with Alteryx
I spent the next three days in a superb course in Alteryx Designer and Advanced. Alteryx is a versatile no-code tool for all tasks related to data ( Data Cleansing, Data Preparation and Data Analytics). There are numerous utilities for data cleaning, data processing, and the number of utilities seems to be growing each day. We navigated various capabilities with our trainer Sean Buckley. The detailed tutorials were quite good, along with challenges that we had to solve in these classes. Sean also brought in lessons learnt from his experience in delivering solutions in Alteryx.
Before coming to the Data School, I wasn’t aware of Alteryx and I realised that this would be one tool that would save our day as we help our customers get value from their data.
Thank God it’s Friday!
Well, this Friday didn’t look like a walk in the park. We were asked to use external data to enrich datasets used in our Data School application. We had 3.5 hrs to complete the task. The next few hours were gruelling as I tried to wrangle 8M rows in a workflow I had to bring some data from an esoteric site that claimed to provide relevant data.
All is well that ends well. The presentations turned out to be quite a learning process with excellent feedback from our coaches Bethany Fox and David Bartolo, including senior consultants at MIP. Yes, we do have a mix of presentations on internal projects as well as client projects each Friday. With another 15 presentations to go, I hope to sharpen my presentation skills as I get more data projects to complete. The day ended with a virtual meeting with DSAU9 (the first batch to start in Melbourne) that had its client presentation, and it was good to get some pointers on extracting more value from our classes as we proceed. In conclusion, this was a very productive week, learning Alteryx, meeting with my cohort and coaches, and becoming a part of the Data School family.
