The peaks of the Data School

by Hanna Nykowska

It’s the very last week of training for DS13. I can’t believe it’s already been four months since we started! It was a crazy ride but fun at that, so here are my top moments of being at the Data School so far.

My fellow cohortians

I know it’s work, but my cohort seems to get along so well! To be honest, I was a bit apprehensive about spending four months with eight people I don’t know in a small room. But it turned out great. In fact, we spend a ridiculous amount of time just laughing and chatting rubbish. If you don’t believe me, just ask anyone who taught us or was in the adjacent room.

Shout out to Street English/Queen’s English Déb, K-dot, Presentation Joe/Holiday Joe/Clustering Joe/Interviewee Joe/Teaching Joe, Big Al, Bobby Boomer, Glasses off/on Jon, Wikipedia Sam and PSH!

Web scraping / API week with Andre

About half way through the training we spent a week with Andre learning more about Alteryx and using web scraping and APIs to get the data ourselves. It opened a world of new possibilities! (Gregg thinks so too.) I had so much fun that I was grinning for the whole week. It was the same week when I created my Rick and Mortuary viz. I have also learned how to combine Alteryx and Tableau so that the Alteryx workflow can be scheduled and the Tableau dashboard is using the up-to-date data without manual intervention (you can read about it here). Pretty cool stuff.

Viz 101 with Andy

In our second week, we had a session about data visualisation. It involved a lot of drawing, assessing vizzes and proposing alternatives. We didn’t use our computers the entire day, just drawing on paper. So. Much. Fun.

Cats and Dogs with Carl

As part of the preperation for our teach the public sessions (otherwise known as Learn what the DS learns), we had a class with Coach Carl on how to teach. The problem with teaching is that every person is different and they will react in their own way. Some people will be nodding and happy to ask and answer questions, others will sit quietly and absorb the information. To understand this, Carl brought up the metaphor of being a cat or a dog. Cats would keep them to themselves whereas dogs would be all over the place. This then turned into categorising ourselves as either a cat, a dog or a hybrid. It’s really funny noticing certain traits about the people around you (and yourself) as being ‘such a cat/dog thing to do’.

Training shadowing with Emily and Ben

Last week I joined Emily and Ben (core team members) for training at a client’s office and had a great time. I think there were a few reasons for that. The training was on macros and apps in Alteryx so an advanced topic for a training session. There were about 20 people in the room getting engaged by the end of the day. The attendees were asking questions and I also got to teach batch macros.

As you may have noticed, it was a lot of fun for me. That’s because I really like learning and you learn a lot in the Data School. In fact, I could just keep learning my whole life, I just need someone to pay me for it. And it’s been happening for the past four months, so… win!

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Hanna Nykowska