Before I started my first week at the data school, I had a lot of worries about my success in the data school, but I kept telling myself, 'I have been selected, they wouldn't have chosen me if I wasn't going to be good at it', however as we all know it can be difficult to ignore those nagging voices when starting a new job.
Now the first week is over, I can confidently say that (most) of the worries I had have washed away.
Day one was definitely an overwhelming day, the anticipation of starting had built up, however we were eased in nicely with a bit of house keeping and tech set up.
Day two consisted of mostly theory, a long but overall interesting (to me) day. We learnt about things such as schemas, data transformation and terminology.
Day three we finally got a chance to get our hands on one of the programs that we will be using, Tableau Prep. Tableau prep is used to clean and prepare your data to make the visualisation process smoother. We learnt techniques such as pivoting, unionising, joining, aggregating and much more, and then we got a chance to have a play with these ideas on the programme. I was thoroughly impressed with the ease of use, and found myself enjoying the process and wanting to do another practice run straight away.
One of my bigger fears coming into this role was not being able to keep up with content along with my peers. I am combatting this fear by allowing myself to ask as many questions I need, regardless of how insignificant I felt they were, and I can say that it has made me feel much more confident in the content, and confident in my abilities to succeed in my new role at the Data school.
By the time we got around to Friday I was feeling like I had blinked and it was time for our first project. I definitely struggled at first to find my footing and understand what I needed to do for my project, doubled with the fact that our work was to be passed onto a peer next week, the situation definitely caused me to break a sweat. However after a bit of brain power, some designs on excalidraw and some playing around on tableau prep, I managed to get an output that seemed presentable. My presentation went smoothly, and my take away for this project was that laying out defined steps to be taken would ration my time more efficiently.
Taking all of the things I have learnt from this week, I think next week's project will go much smoother with the hindsight of how to delegate my time. Wish me luck!