We're in the immersion phase at Merit and heavy into data cleaning and SQL. From what I've learned about this industry, these are two of the most important skills to get good at if you want to make your life easier as a data analyst. As far as working to make your dataset nice and tidy, I'm all for it. I love keeping things neat and organized and get a bang out of throwing away junk I don't need. But therein lies the problem when applied to my new profession. I really have to stop the urge to DELETE stuff I don't think I'm going to need and want out of the way. I was out here gleefully deleting whole columns of data that I wasn't going to analyze, only later to realize why that is totally not the move. Don't worry, I learned about working copies real quick and won't be ruining original datasets anymore.
It's been very fun to learn a whole new industry and feel like I get this new world of tech. But it's also been very humbling. I'm used to being very good at what I do. I've been in education and childcare for a long time and what I do seems easy and natural to me. Now I've morphed into a total beginner again, trying to learn some complex skills and really feeling the struggle of trying and failing and trying again. It's uncomfortable and tiring. But, man, when something I've been trying to get to work finally does - it feels fantastic! And so I keep learning and tell myself that someday soon all of this will feel easy and natural, too.
I can't close without a moment of hype for Merit. This week, we created our new resumes, focusing on our skills as data analysts. Honestly, I felt mine were pretty meager at this early point. I had tried to put together a resume using some of the many templates out there and couldn't figure out how to highlight a career in which I had no past experience. Enter the Merit America data analyst resume template. What a hero! The job success and career coaches really crafted some magic and this new resume has me talking for a full half a page about my data analyst skills. This resume alone was worth the price of admission. Thank you coaches!
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