Hi everyone, welcome to my first Data School blog post! I started training on Monday 4th October as part of DS27 and in this post I’ll be summarising my first week of learning.
Monday: The day began with Craig (CTO) and Luke (Head of Recruitment) helping us set up our laptops before a session with Tom (Founder and MD), who gave us an overview of the company and its history. We also met Carl (The Other Head Coach) and later had a mini meet and greet with three data schoolers a little further ahead of us in the process. Much of day one was about introductions, we must have given a brief overview of ourselves four or five times throughout the day to different people!
Tuesday: Day two was when the real training started. We had an introduction to Alteryx with Katy and worked on a couple of workflows throughout the day to get us familiar with as many of the different tools available in the software as possible. An important thing to do here was ask questions when stuck or just feeling a bit lost, which has been a key takeaway from the whole week in general.
Wednesday: We had an introduction with Claire (HR) before a quick chat with Benedetta (Head of Consultant Support) about the support systems the company has in place to help us throughout our training and placements. Following this we returned back to Alteryx, powering through more tools and later going through the solution to a weekly challenge started on Tuesday. Lastly, we met Andy (Head Coach) and talked about everything we have to look forward to!
Thursday: A day of Alteryx consolidation with Peter. To begin with, we all outlined the tools we felt comfortable with and not so comfortable with, which then became the focus of the day. In the afternoon, we completed another weekly challenge and posted it on the Alteryx Community Weekly Challenge page.
Friday: Project day. We were set our first project by Carl at 9am for which we had to find a new data source that complimented our original application to The Data School, prepare it in Alteryx and then update the original viz in Tableau... all in the space of three hours. For my application, I attempted to predict the number of medals Team GB would win at the 2020 (21) Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo using funding figures from the last five editions of the summer games. Logically, my idea was to combine my original dataset with Team GB’s medal count from the now completed games. However, I hit a snag when trying to join the two together, which left me scrambling to get a presentable piece of work together. Despite this, I was able to outline where I had got to with my workflow in Alteryx and the presentation went more or less to plan. To finish the week, we then had the opportunity to watch DS25’s presentation for their client project.
Note to self: When looking back over my project workflow, I realised I was only a few steps away from reaching my desired goal, highlighting the importance of getting away from the screen and returning with a clear mind.
That pretty much wraps up Week 1 at The Data School. It’s been a whirlwind of a start and I look forward to seeing what Week 2 throws at us!
