Hi, I’m Déb. Can I just say that I’m happy?

by Débora Contente

After all, that’s my surname… I am waiting for you to laugh, but now I realise that you may not understand. Contente means happy in Portuguese and that is all I can think of right now – how happy I am.

One of the reasons that made me apply for the Data School was how happy people looked like every time I came to its events – I wanted to discover if it was all rehearsed and what better way to do it than joining them? Spoiler alert: For now, it looks like it is genuine, but I will update you on that along the way.

Now that you know my surname and why I joined the Data School, I think it is safe to continue.

I am proud to say that I am part of the DS13 and that I have experienced the first week. It was an awesome beginning and if you want to know what we learnt I recommend you to read these posts from Sam and Jonathan as they sum up what we did on each day. For me, along with these, my findings were the following:

  1. If you are a Londoner, you probably already know this one – Bank station is impossible at peak times. Specially in the afternoon, if you want to catch your train there. Citymapper tells me that my quickest route is from Bank, but it does not count with human traffic or the fact that Bank station is a maze. So now I am choosing the Mansion House station for my commute. Despite having to make a switch that otherwise I would not need, I still arrive home earlier and much less stress than if I had chosen Bank.
  2. I need to change my reaction when presented with a task to be completed in a tight deadline. My first step has always been panicking and it takes too much of that valuable little time I have. So, I am now working on reducing it until it finally disappears (I hope!).

Even though I have only mentioned slightly negative points, those were the only negative things last week, and I believe those are the ones we can improve the most with when trying to transform them into positive ones.

With such an amazing week, I found myself in the weekend awaiting eagerly for Monday and for all the things I would learn (and I was not wrong, I learnt a lot on Monday! But that’s for another post). Can you imagine? A job that you look forward going to? Yup. That is the dream, and we are living it.