It’s been hard, man

Two weeks ago, I ordered Pad See Ew. It had been a hard day, a long day, an anxious day. I had spent too much time alone and then a terrifying ten minutes inside a small, badly ventilated office with unmasked people in an effort to print a single pdf document. So naturally, on my way home I ordered comfort food.

The restaurant was closing and one of the workers was wiping down tables as I waited. She had a round face and kind, dark brown eyes. She asked me if I had just finished work…

Part 3 of a New Graduate’s Guide to Becoming a Data/Business Analyst

Contents

Using LinkedIn — How to make your profile
Post on LinkedIn, a lot.
Use your alumni network
Informational interviews and how to do them effectively

This is Part 3 of a New Graduate’s Guide to Becoming a Business/Data Analyst.

Use LinkedIn

This is one of the pieces of advice that any half-decent article about finding a job includes, but I cannot emphasize it enough: Use LinkedIn.

Why?
1. Your LinkedIn page is almost always the first impression that a potential employer or networking contact gets of you.

• I did not…

Contents

Projects
SQL
Website

Projects

You’ve probably heard a lot about the importance of projects.

Projects are particularly crucial for a recent graduate applying to be a data analyst or a business analyst because they demonstrate proficiency in skills that you probably didn’t use outside of a classroom context.

As much as I might want to list my Data Structures class as experience because I used Java during it, please for the love of god, do not put any computer science labs or classes on your resume. Not only is putting labs on the internet likely directly against your school’s honor code…

Unemployment is hard. Use time management to help you through it.

While this is article stands alone, this is also Part 5 of New Graduate’s Guide to Becoming a Business/Data Analyst.

TL;DR

• Time Management — How to Keep Your Sanity During Your Job Search
• Make a daily schedule
• Make sure there’s at least of each of these things in your schedule
• Have something else going on — preferably multiple things
• Set small goals
• Take care of yourself
• Give yourself a break

Make a daily schedule

Look, I’m a not routine person. But when you’re living in your parents’ basement in…

Part 1 of A New Graduate’s Guide to Becoming a Data/Business Analyst

Contents

What degree should I have?
What experience should I have?
Skills (to be continued in the next post)

Introduction

This is the first blog in a series titled “A New Graduate’s Guide to Becoming a Data/Business Analyst”.

This series is written to help recent college graduates learn how to become a data or business analyst, particularly ones who are graduating during the coronavirus pandemic. …

It’s strange to walk the grounds of my old high school this fall. In the past, visits had been brief glimpses of the past moving stubbornly forward. Different faces, same faces, all housed together in a building I used to know. Did I really look that young? Is that a saxophone in my old locker?

Now that it’s a pandemic, it’s easier. There aren’t any pesky whippersnappers hogging the building and reminding me that I do not belong. The red-yellow leaves smell fresh with rainwater, yet earthy too, as if I can already smell them melting into the ground. …

What is Differential Privacy?

Differential privacy is a data anonymization technique that’s used by major technology companies such as Apple and Google. The goal of differential privacy is simple: allow data analysts to build accurate models without sacrificing the privacy of the individual data points.

But what does “sacrificing the privacy of the data points” mean? Well, let’s think about an example. Suppose I have a dataset that contains information (age, gender, treatment, marriage status, other medical conditions, etc.) about every person who was treated for breast cancer at Hospital X. In this case, a data point is a row of a spreadsheet (or…

Here’s why.

I began coding my website on a whim sometime in August. It’ll be fun, I thought. I had seen a few data science blogs built with R using blogdown, and it looked pretty simple to do. Before I knew it, I was learning how to use Hugo, a static website generator.

With Hugo, you can directly access and edit just about all of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that goes into it. Hugo makes things a bit simpler by giving you a few variables and locations to reference, and that’s it. You’re on your own after that.

Most…