The Journey From Being an Applicant to a Consultant-in-Training (Second Chapter) (First Chapter)
After submitting my first (dreadful) dashboard to The Data School, I was expecting silence. However, interestingly enough, I received feedback from Collin, the recruitment lead for The Data School New York. After having been ghosted from many other job applications, it came to a complete surprise to even receive a response at all, let alone within a week. Collin shared the positives of the dashboard (but in my mind, I felt the feedback was overly kind, I mean just look at it!).
Nevertheless, Collin gave me suggestions on color choice, the addition of line graphs, and story ideas. After reading through the email, I thought to myself, since they were giving me the opportunity to improve myself, I wanted to put in more effort towards my dashboard.
As a result, I devoted my attention to my dashboard, spending any free time I had to better it; I applied the suggestions, added my own flair, and consulted resources to find ways to really make my dashboard stand out. I had to give it my all, no cutting corners. If they were giving me this opportunity , I wanted to show them what I’m capable of. Remembering that I was also competing against potentially hundreds of applicants for a spot in a cohort of eight people, I couldn’t slack off. Each time I updated my dashboard, I would be given more feedback to make it even better. Eventually, I saw this as a challenge; even if it wasn’t the intention, I wanted to prove that I could implement Tableau best practices into my dashboard. Obviously, coming from a background with little to no knowledge on Tableau, I wasn’t able to employ all of the suggestions, but I tried my best.
Eventually, after numerous weeks and many iterations of my dashboard, I emailed them again for more feedback. However, instead of feedback, I was actually given the opportunity to present my dashboard in an interview. I was accepted to the next step of the interview process! I was ecstatic, yet anxious; I had to tell a story about my work. So I switched gears and I went from searching up Tableau features to presentation advice. Fortunately, the dataset I had chosen was about gaming, a topic that I loved, so finding things to say came easily. On the day of the interview I was interviewed by both Ann Jackson and Michael McFadden.
After a brief overview on The Data School and general interview questions, I introduced my dashboard. My main focus was emphasizing the interactivity and automaticity of my dashboard(you can see the last version here). I expressed my passion for gaming in the presentation as I did for my dashboard, adding in little facts here and there to add personality to my presentation. Afterwards, during feedback, they praised my confidence in the presentation, as well as the visual appeal of my dashboard. They specifically pointed out how I included fun facts to help keep them engaged. I did really well and was told that I would move on to the final interview! I couldn’t believe it at all. I felt a weight drop from my shoulders. However, when I was told that I would need to create another dashboard for the final interview, I was reminded again that I wasn’t done yet.