Working my way through the Coursera Data Analytics Course

I'm sitting at my desktop computer in my home-office and working my way through the last of 8 courses in the Google Data Analytics course offered through Coursera. It has been a journey and I've picked up quite a few new skills (SQL, Tableau, R) and now I'm looking towards a capstone project that I can add to my portfolio. 

I already have a dataset so I am hoping to use that one, but we'll see the options presented. 

Sometimes it can be hard to pin thoughts down and also decide where to put them. This is not the first website I've put together and not the first blog I've tried. But, I'm hoping to create a hub for the walking, haunted, ancient temple that is myself. I don't claim any grand insights or discoveries, just little bits of me left strewn on the internet. 

I'm here in the first place because I am changing the course of my life. For 20 years I was a zoo keeper. It was a large part of who I am, still, and I was sure it would be what I was until I retired. But then, the pandemic came and the company made adjustments for that, and my body let me know it was time to step away. Zookeeping, especially for large hoofstock, is a very physically demanding job, and added to the weather/climate of central Florida, let's just say, having been also born and raised in Florida, I'm a bit tired of being in the sun. I am happily watching my tan fade. 

I left my career in the middle of May and have been extremely fortunate to live without a job for over two months now. I've been able to slowly relearn what pace I want to life my life, rather than the one set by my previous employer (and also myself, hustle culture and productivity are hungry beasts.) I've slept and painted and written stories set in other lovely worlds. And I've worked through a Data Analytics course that has helped me learn the skills I will need for my new career. 

Data Analytics has been something I've always been drawn to, I just hadn't realized it. I was one of the most computer literate people on the team and often was the one who sought out data to try and understand the problems and challenges we would face. Animal care is a field full of data, you just have to write it down! So yeah, I've been doing data analytics for decades, I just only used excel or Google sheets to manage all of it. Now, I've got a few other tools. 

Which brings us back to a case study and working on my portfolio. I'm still building out and cleaning my data set, but I'm excited to dig into it and pull out the insights hidden within. And hopefully I'll remember to post and document that progress. Next post will be a summary of what I've got so far and what I hope to do with it. So yeah, ideally, more to come. Hopefully. Probably. It's a strong maybe. 

​- Jen Mac