I still remember when I was offered a place at the data school. First of all, I didn't even realise I was being offered a place, it took Andy saying it three times for me to get it 🤦🏽‍♀️and then, when I finally understood, I started laughing................ Who does that OMG? Obviously, I accepted and about a month letter, I walked into the office building for my first day.

During my first week, I had a whirlwind of emotions (some positive some negative). We were given a talk regarding imposter syndrome but naïvely I didn't think that would be a problem for me. Boy was I wrong. I knew the people that had been in the data school were going to be better than me, they'd been doing this for longer so that wasn't the problem. But in my first week, I felt like I couldn't keep up with everyone else in my cohort, and considering we started together, I couldn't understand why it was so hard for me. Also, before I started, I thought I had a little knowledge of Tableau seeing as I did use it for the application, but all of a sudden I couldn't even figure out what I had done before. Basically in my head, I was comparing myself to everyone immediately around me and my own self and I found myself wanting all the time and i was struggling to deal with that. This difficult time was also an opportunity though, to experience how the staff at the Data School deal with these issues. Basically, my Coach realised something was wrong, came to talk to me about it, and helped me set up a way to keep my head in the game.

Fast forward 3 months and things have changed a lot. I still have yonks to learn but that's okay. I've done my Tableau and Alteryx certifications and I passed so I must know something right. I've also found that I love both the consulting and the analytics side of the job, so I'm a lot more flexible than I initially thought (was leaning more towards the consulting side before). Even more surprising, I found that I loved being project manager. 🤯 The countdown to the end of training is now on and I have to make a plan for how I will use my last 3 weeks. This is my attempt at having an accountability partner 😉🤣

My plan

1. Blogging. Blogs have helped me so much since I joined the data school and it's important to me that I give back, not just with blogs about technical things, but also about how to be a good data analyst.
2. Tableau Public profile. Lots of workout wednesday's need to be done. I also have a lot of private projects that need finishing and uploading. This profile is incredibly important for employability so I advise everyone to flesh out their profile whenever possible.
3. Alteryx challenges. I need to go over all the tools I've learnt over the last 3 months and their use cases. The best way to do this are challenges so 🤷🏽‍♀
4. Alteryx Advanced Exam. I really want to have this in the bag before placements start.

It's been an awesome journey so let's finish the 1st leg with a bang!!