It’s been four months since I was accepted into DS 37 at The Data School. It’s been a long wait that’s seemed even longer as I’ve been itching to get going and begin my journey to becoming a Tableau/Alteryx consultant. I arrived on my first day full of excitement and with an eagerness to learn and I have ended my first week with those same feelings present even stronger.
Our cohort began by spending a large part of Monday setting up our laptops; with all the various software’s we use this was a bigger job than it sounds. We were also introduced to several core team members at The Information Lab including the founder Tom Brown, each of whom made me feel welcome and part of the team straight away. One thing that really stood out to me on day one was the introduction to the company’s internal social media platform convo and the openness of communication across the company. We were encouraged to share any questions, no matter how beginner, to the whole UK group. Coming from a working background where emails dominated the conversation, this will certainly take some time to adjust to.
On Tuesday, the training began, starting with a session on modern data architecture and moving on to our first look at Alteryx. Both sessions concerned topics that were new to me, but the training was performed at a manageable pace and I left day two feeling like I’d learnt a lot. This feeling continued as we spent Wednesday diving deeper into the basic tools of Alteryx. We were given demonstrations on how to navigate around the software as well as how to clean up data sets using tools such as Filters, Formulas and Joins. We then implemented what we’d learnt by completing tasks, including an Alteryx challenge. For our fourth day we continued looking at cleaning up data, only this time, we did it using Tableau Prep. It was interesting to see the differences between this software and Alteryx. Having used Tableau before, I found Tableau Prep to be more intuitive however, Alteryx clearly has more capabilities.
On our final day of the first week we were given the whole morning to prepare a 10 minute presentation on a selected topic. I chose to give a demonstration on how to clean and organize data using the profile pane in Tableau Prep. This topic was fresh in my mind from the day before, and we were given feedback regarding our content and presentation skills. We also watched DS 35’s client presentation, giving great insight into how the skills that we’re learning are going to be used in the coming weeks and beyond.
By the end of the week I felt like I’d been introduced to The Data School and how it works, as well as got a good start in my training. Having been introduced to Alteryx and Tableau Prep, I’m excited to start my training in Tableau next week.