My BI Journey - Pt. 1 (College)
- sarahmriecke
- Jul 11, 2022
- 6 min read
Follow along with the first part of a two part blog series of how I explain how I got my start in BI while in college.
The start of my BI journey happened while I was in college. I didn't even know that I wanted to be in data, my mind was pretty set on art. That all changed pretty quickly though.
College - Year 1
Fresh out of high school, I decided that I wanted to go to college for Graphic Design. I went to college at the University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth (and no, not the Ivy League school), with intentions to study Graphic Design.
The first year within the program included the basic art classes, figure drawing, sculpture, etc. but we wouldn't get into the graphic design specific classes until year 2. For the remaining 3 years, there was a specific graphic design course each semester that was needed in order to graduate in 4 years.
I had graduated high school with 60 college credits, 56 of which transferred. This put me as a junior (credit wise) my second semester of year 1. In order to stay on campus and receive financial aid into my 4th year of the Graphic Design program, I would need to stay full time. This meant I would need to double major.
I started college with the intent to study Graphic Design. Due to the sequential order of coursework and the number of credits I had earned in high school, I quickly learned I would need to double major in order to quality for financial aid and remain a full time student.
I considered multiple options for my double major. I looked into illustration and even other art majors. During this time, I had already had some business credits that transferred, so I figured that I would just work towards my minor in business during my 2nd semester my first year.
I fell in love with one of my classes - management information systems. I learned about the Excel world (and Access), and from that moment I knew I wanted to work in Excel. I found my second major. Graphic Design and Management Information Systems (MIS) - I was so set on these two.
The end of year 1 came around, and while I love art and design, I wasn't as passionate about it as I was Excel. That is when I made the switch to major in just MIS. I didn't need to worry about full time credits in the last year, since I would be able to graduate a year early.
At the end of my first year of college, I knew that art and design was not what I was meant to be, instead it was meant to be focused around data, analytics, and excel.
College - Years 2-3
After switching majors, there was no regrets. Actually, it was a class in my 2nd year that sealed the deal for me, and from there on out, I knew I selected the right major.
It was spring semester of my 2nd year, and I was taking a 400 level MIS course. This course was taught by a professor that would come to become one of my favorites throughout the rest of my years in my undergraduate and graduate degree. This is the class were I was introduced to SQL and visualizing data utilizing Tableau. As soon as I got my hands on Tableau, I knew that I loved visualizing data to help tell a story.
Tableau was the start of my journey into the world of data visualizations and storytelling. From this point on, I knew my focus would be visualizing data to tell a story with it.
At the same time, I was taking another 400 level POM (operations) course where I learned R. I can't really say I learned R, because I didn't retain it, but because of this class, I got close to another professor (and director of the program) within the business college. Not only would this connection be useful throughout the rest of my years, he is also the reason I entered DataFest.
DataFest was a weekend data competition where teams came together and would take the provided dataset and present findings at the end of the weekend. The dataset provided was travel data from Expedia.
My team (The Data Monkeys - we ate a lot of bananas that weekend) was mostly people from the POM class, and I believe I was the only one from the MIS class. Due to this, most of our knowledge for analyzing data was going to be utilizing R. I convinced the team though that in order to visualize the data, we should use Tableau. The visualizations and interactivity we would get from a dashboard would be fantastic.
Although we should have probably won the award for the best visualization, we won the award for best us of outside data (we were the only ones that utilized outside data by comparing average length of stays vs average hotel prices in countries). This weekend was a blast, and I ended up participating in the event the year after (2018) and even mentoring in 2019.
The MIS course along with DataFest led me towards focusing on business intelligence. I knew if I could have fun from a course as well as a weekend competition, I would enjoy creating visualizations for many years to come.
DataFest helped me realize that I would enjoy creating visualizations and dashboards. After those weekends of competition, I wanted to keep creating more dashboards.
Other courses throughout these two years included:
Databases - specifically utilizing Access
Computer Networking
Programming Languages - C, HTML, etc.
Independent Study - Utilizing R, Tableau, and working with the Boys & Girls Club
Capstone Class - Project Management & Utilizing Skills throughout other courses
Below are some examples of work from the classes listed above, which have all helped me gain the needed knowledge to become the Business Intelligence Analyst I am today.
Graduate School - Year 1/4
A lot of the courses I took in my undergrad didn't focus too much on business intelligence. They were all more generic MIS courses that all of the MIS students took. Because of this, I did not feel like I was fully prepared to get a job that I wanted.
I decided to stay for one extra year at UMass Dartmouth and get my MBA, with a concentration in Business Intelligence. I'd like to stay I stuck with that concentration, but end the end I decided to go more with a generic MBA.
There is one class in particular that I took during my MBA that I believe ultimately set me up for success in my future jobs after school. This course was Business Intelligence & Knowledge Management. This was the class where I got to expand more on some of the undergrad classes I took, and dig more into business intelligence outside of visualizations.
For the business intelligence side of the course, I learned more in-depth pivot tables, specifically around OLAP while getting to "slice and dice" data to get different pieces of information from a dataset. I once again got to learn more about ERD diagrams and star vs snowflake schemas for databases.
The OLAP project is what helped me land my first job as a Yield Analyst at Collette. I was able to provide a printout from the project to show the work that I had done in college that related to the job description where knowledge in Excel was the top skill needed.
I was able to utilize coursework to help land my first professional job. I brought a printout of a project utilizing Excel and pivot tables to my job interview.
On the knowledge management side of the class, I learned about various different ways that companies should be utilizing knowledge management to make sure knowledge is not lost from job to job or person to person. I also learned the different between implicit and explicit knowledge and the important of both to a company.
This course ended with a research paper. My focus was on Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management in the Tourism Industry.
Within this paper, I explored types of knowledge within the industry, the use of BI o help understand tourism, KM and BI integrated, as well as software, techniques and tools that could be used. Little did I know that I would actually end up working in the tourism industry for a little after a year.
There were other courses I took during my MBA, but most were random required classes. The classes for the BI concentration of the MBA would have been duplicative to what I did during my undergraduate degree. Instead I ended up taking an independent study where I focused on Tableau vs. Qlik and then a cost accounting course.
Within 4 years for undergraduate and graduate school, I had my Bachelor's in MIS and my MBA. I was ready to tackle anything.
Sneak Peak - Pt. 2 (Professional)
I was indeed ready to tackle anything. Funny part was, I had already starting to tackle the real world with a professional job before I even finished my MBA.
Follow along in part two of the series where I discuss my professional careers and how I transitioned from mostly Excel to Power BI (leaving Tableau behind in college).
I cover my experiences from 2019 working at Collette to present day working at Parable Associates.
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