Day 6 – Life and art combine

I knew this internship would speed by, but it feels like only yesterday that I was leaving my job and wondering what ‘life outside’ the government was going to be like. So far is pretty good.

Today was really fun. The aim for the day was to get some dash board style displays of the Mortality data I have been chiselling away at.

I’ve decided I am more interested in looking at how the graphics and layout support the message in the data, as opposed to just reporting the data and so I ended up trialling some of my ideas with a programme called Pixelmator. This allows my desire for something graphically appealing to be fulfilled, however, they don’t update themselves, so aren’t really a classic functional reporting dashboard. Such is life and art!

As for as the data analysis, I’ve been working mostly in Tableau and Excel. I do kinda love Excel, have done for about 13 years, but I have had to admit, Tableau is certainly pretty smooth. And has some very nice query and reporting functions which I am enjoying, now that I am over some of the learning hump of last week!

So next week is the final two days, just as I am getting used to the lovely work space at Optimal BI and have even (mostly!) learnt people’s names. One of the biggest things that have hit me in the last few days is the feeling of what it is like working for myself. On one hand, I get to decide what I work on, on the other, I feel so much more accountable and impacted by that decision.

The verdict is still out on which I prefer. Maybe I’ll know by next week!

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