Day 1 – Information Overload

Where to start? The beginning or the end? The feeling of brain drain, or the buzz of stretched grey matter!
Today was day one working in an eight day internship at the funky orange office that is Optimal BI. I couldn’t be in a space much different to my steady government job I finished just four days ago.
For starters the room is warm. The office is open plan in a friendly organic fashion, and there are mellow tunes to smooth the silence of intense focus. I love it!
The day started with being dropped straight into the capable plans of Mel and Shane, and what felt like a day crash course was actually a solid hour and a half going through the results based accountability method to plan how I am going to deliver a project where I can learn about data visualisation, from start to ‘art’. And have something to show for it. In eight days. Hear’s hoping!
I got pretty excited at the mention of poker cards, only to find I was well off the mark and in fact the poker cards are a great method to collectively determine the time budget for each section of work, or ‘story’. Pretty cool.
Then the day was onto WHO data, and incomes and genders and death. And finding a story to tell out of all these random data sets which seemed to look promising on a first look, then prove to vary just enough to be tricky to compare… All in all a great first day, so many new meanings, and methods and words. But I’m looking forward to tomorrow, and I think Manny is too!

About Esther Richardson

Esther is doing a short 8 day internship (over 4 weeks) to decide if she wants to change careers from studying exotic diseases (Epidemiology) to becoming a Data Story teller.
These are her guests blogs on her experience.

Esther Richardson