The first week of any job can be quite a daunting prospect but the introduction to The Information Lab and the Data School was extremely pleasant. A lot of information is passed down to you immediately but the attitude and environment around the company and people is very relaxed, which puts you at ease very quickly.
Starting on Monday, the day is filled with introductions and admin work including downloading the relevant software that is required for not only the rest of the week but for the whole of your tenure at the Data School.
The next two days were based around getting a breakdown of all the basic and most used tools in a data processing and cleaning software called Alteryx. The drag and drop functionality and useful tips on the icons makes Alteryx a nice software to use and learn on the fly.
Moving onto Thursday, the teaching was solely focused onto Tableau's version of Alteryx - Tableau Prep. Similar to Tableau, Tableau Prep has a nice interface and is quite easy to use, especially for a person who has very limited experience in coding.
As with every week, Friday is a day for projects that combine the learning that you have gone through the week. The project this week entailed bringing in a data source to clean via Alteryx or Tableau Prep with the hope of combining it with the data source that was used for the original Data School application. I ended up using Alteryx given the data source I imported needed a slightly more advanced software to clean the data. Despite some challenges, the training on Tuesday and Wednesday meant I was able to complete the challenge and present my findings well.
Overall, that was a pretty fun introductory week and I've met a lot of lovely people along the way already. We'll see what challenges Week 2 brings up!