Learning Data Analytics...

From Learning SQL to winning a Nanodegree Scholarship

If you know me very well, you’d know that I’ve been on this journey of trying to learn Data Analytics for the longest time and in fact, I had thought my first out of uni job would be working as a business analyst.

However, that didn’t work out and instead, I found myself in a Digital Marketing Agency and afterwards doing Product Marketing and Growth for a number of Nigerian Startups which I genuinely love and enjoy.

Interestingly,  as the things I do at work evolve, I’ve also found that a big part of Growth and Product Marketing is being data-aware and making data-informed decisions about marketing efforts, A/B testing, experimenting and presenting results in the form of dashboards and charts etc.  All of which is a big part of data analytics hence, the reason I got back to taking some courses on data analytics to upskill for work.

 I audited Udacity’s Business Analytics Nanodegree early last year while there was a free one month access at the beginning of the global lockdown unfortunately, I couldn’t finish it in that short period, however, I relearnt concepts in statistics as well as using Excel for analysing data.  I also took a step further and took a beginner course on SQL for Data Science on Coursera, The knowledge I acquired was in sync with some other courses I had taken previously(statistics, Excel and a little bit of Tableau too) and all these just increased my drive and interest to learn more.

At the beginning of this year, one of the things on my ‘To-Achieve” list was getting a  Nanodegree Certification however, I wasn't exactly sure of how to afford it and so I was on the lookout for opportunities in that regard.

And voila! I was scrolling Twitter one day (as a Twitter finger that I am),  saw a tweet advertising Ire Aderinokun’s Nanodegree scholarship and I just knew this was it! 

And guess what?? 

I applied and I got in!!!

And so far, it’s been an invaluable experience from learning to work with Anaconda, Jupyter and progressing into Python Libraries such as Pandas, Numpy, Seaborn, Matplotlib and Data Wrangling.

While Marketing is a big part of me - it’s something I’ve always done and will continue to do, I think it’s time to spread my wings and explore on a bigger scale what data analytics holds in store for me, which is why winning this Nanodegree Scholarship is a big deal for me.

I have 5 capstone projects to complete in order to be awarded a certificate, and I hope to write about each of these projects and major learning outcomes as I go along.

 I hope you find them interesting enough to read and I look forward to reading your comments as well.