Data Analyst Challenge in Queenstown, New Zealand (QRC week 5 recap)
I'm Daniel, an aspiring data analyst living in Queenstown, New Zealand. I'm five weeks into my full 10-week QRC school program and it's summer break. If you're wondering how school is going and why I chose to go to a non-self-taught school, read on.
Why I chose a local school (QRC) over self-taught
Before I start writing about my data analyst challenge in Queenstown, New Zealand, I want to say that I've been thinking about this for a very long time.
I'm currently working as a chef, but I've always wanted to make a career change. In particular, I wanted to work with data.
I wondered if I would be able to study data in Queenstown, New Zealand, a city known for its tourism, and not one of the big cities like Auckland, Wellington, or Christchurch.
Initially, the Coursera is a popular online learning platform called Google Data Analytics Lessonsat the time. I was really into it at first, but I was working, writing blog posts, studying English, and attending lectures, and I was getting tired of it, so I gave up halfway through.
The Real Reason I Chose School Over Self-Taught: The Power of Networks
I chose the school because I already had experience studying with online learning platforms. A chef colleague of mine was advertising on Facebook for a QRC Data Analytics Fundamentals It was the introduction to the course that got me started.
The funny thing is, I didn't even know this school existed, and it was a five-minute walk from my workplace.
It's actually much cheaper to study online, but I wanted to actually meet people in the data field.
I wanted to meet the people I was studying with, the people who were teaching me, the people who were in charge of the IT curriculum at my school, and in general, I felt the need to network.
Five weeks in the life of a data analyst in Queenstown
English isn't perfect, let IT fix it
Actually, what I struggled with more than studying data was my English. Despite having lived in New Zealand for a long time, I don't speak much English, so my first concern was what if I didn't understand the lectures?.
My hunch was correct, and after the first lecture, I decided that I needed to start recording lectures. When I walked into class in the morning, the first thing I did was open the 123app record voice I turned on the webpage and started recording.
Then I focused on the class, and after the class, I transcribed the audio data into a report using Google Notebook LM in both Korean and English, summarizing the key points. The class was 2-3 hours long, but I think I only needed 1-2 pages.
Notebook LM can also convert voice data into audio popcasts, so I could listen to them on my bus commute to and from class to improve my understanding of the next lesson. Of course, the audio files in popcast format were available in both Korean and English.
In this way, I was able to follow along with the recordings and catch up on what I didn't understand in class each day.
First, you will learn the basic concepts of data, the data cycle (ingestion-cleansing-dashboard), specific data cleaning methods (Colab, Power query), and creating dashboards based on that data (Power BI, Tableau).
Meet the real IT people
QRC schools also organized meetings between students and working IT professionals. They would take us to tech events after class, or have people in the industry judge our first and second presentations so we could get the feedback we needed.
For the second presentation in particular, a working IT industry professional came into the class to give feedback after the presentation, and after the class we had a tea break to answer any questions the students had.
I was very nervous because of my English, but so were my classmates. However, after the class, I saw my classmates introduce themselves to the practitioners and ask a lot of questions without any nervousness, and I realized that the culture is different.
In fact, I didn't ask many data-related questions. However, as Korea has become more famous these days, I have gotten a lot of questions about Korea. And people asked us a lot about why we started studying data. I think they were curious about the journey we took to get here.
As I was talking to them, it was nice to hear some real stories of data-related work, and I was like, "I wish I could get a job like that sooner rather than later." And then I started talking to some of them about the Linkedinwhich is also a first cousin.
New Zealand micro-credential
I go to school Monday through Friday mornings and work as a chef 40 hours a week in the afternoons. For people who actually have to earn money, I'm a New Zealand Microcreditsfor this.
1) Guaranteed by the New Zealand Government
When I was in Auckland, I actually wanted to go to tech school, which was also an IT program, but it was a three-year program. I didn't want to take the plunge because I had to actually work. Of course, the training period was also too long. For this reason, I gave up on the course at that time.
The New Zealand government realized that there was a demand for people like me, so they created microcredits courses. It's a way for people like me who want to change careers to learn specialized skills in a short period of time.
2) Time is gold
Time is gold for those thinking about a career change. Of course, they are presumably of a certain age, like me. So microcredits that condense a three-year course to its essentials and teach it in just 10 weeks sound very appealing.
Of course, if you want to go deeper after this microcredits course, you can study another training course, which is an option.
For reference, my course was a 10-week course, 40 credits, and cost NZD $2560 (Domestic). In Korean money, that's a little over 2 million won. For International, I think it was triple the amount above.
Learning is definitely paid for anyway. In order to cover the murderous cost of living in Queenstown, I needed to be more disciplined with my spending, so I brought coffee from home, sent remittances to Korea when the exchange rate was high, and sent them when it was low. Wise guarantees very low feesfrequently.
3) Study in the field
Actually, I had studied Python for about two months before joining this school. I worked really hard to learn Python code through an online education platform in Korea.
On our first day of actually writing Python code, we used the Google Colabfor the first time. Now, when it came time to show the Python code we had been working on, we realized that AI could easily create the code we wanted. Our classmates, who didn't know any code, started using colab with ease.
A week after we started, our tutor gave us a part-time job opportunity. We submitted our CVs right away, and one of my classmates got the job.
The tutor said that he advised the employer that we don't know much about Data yet, but that we will be able to use it in the real world as we learn it one by one.
I'm the type of person who tends to wait until I've mastered something before I start working on it, so being able to apply it in the field as I'm learning it was really impressive to me.
Summer vacation, 5 weeks left in the course
I'm writing today from Queenstown, New Zealand, on the Data Analyst Challenge. My life of going to school in the morning and work in the afternoon has come to a halt for the time being. This is because I'm on a short summer vacation (3 weeks), including the Christmas season.
I'm going to use those three weeks to study English and practice dashboards. Creating charts in the dashboard seemed easy, but then I would turn around and forget. I would turn around and think, "How did I do that?.
So I'm going to record them one by one. Of course, I could show the AI a photo or video to solve it, but I'd rather record it than do that every time, so I can easily understand the process when I need to.
The Data Analyst Challenge in Queenstown, New Zealand continues, and I can't wait to share on this blog that I've landed a related job one day.
If you're looking to make a career change in New Zealand and want to gain relevant information and skills, I'd recommend keeping an eye out for New Zealand microcredits courses.
