If you have read my dashboard week blogs, you would have seen this messy note already. This is from my day 3 of dashboard week. For those who don't know, dashboard is the final week of our four months training. In this week, we are tasked to make a dashboard in less than 5 hours every day based on different requirements. The tasks are purposely made to be difficult so we can practice problem solving.
On day 3, I was given a list of NASA APIs and was tasked to make a dashboard with the data. To be honest, when I was browsing through the list of APIs, I had no idea what I was reading for the most part. One of my colleagues has an astrophysics background; however, he wasn't in that day so I decided to do my best to learn about the space in an one hour.
I decided to do my research on space weather and focus on geomagnetic storm. I think it took me more than an hour to figure out the causal relationship between different space weather elements. At the end I did not manage to make the dashboard I had planned because I run out of time, but I think this task reflected a crucial part of being a consultant, which is to teach yourself a topic that you are not familiar with in a short period of time. Consultants usually jump from projects to projects, meaning we have to be able to pick up a new project in a short amount of time. And we don't always get to work with topics that we are familiar with, which is alright. We don't need to know everything. We just need to know how to get to the answer we want.