The most intimidating thing about being chosen for this residency program was knowing that I was chosen, along with 9 other women, out of about 80 or more applicants.

I’m not sure what you would do in this situation, but I started to stress out. Imposter Syndrome kicked in and I was so worried that I wouldn’t be good enough and they’d regret picking me for the cohort. Especially considering that the first couple of weeks for any program tend to be quiet. I wondered if I was missing something.

With 10 of us, we’ve been split into two teams of five, and it’s been going pretty well lately. I’ve been having a lot of fun working with these women and finding solutions, every one of us is invested in and working hard on this project, and there doesn’t seem to be slack anywhere.

Oh, the project!

At the center of this program is a company who has contracted Women in Data to help them come up with a business problem. We are building a simple data pipeline that would take any csv, clean it, create keywords and solutions, and then allow them to toss it into Tableau, with a comprehensive and interactive dashboard.

You know me, it was hard to let go of Tableau at first, so it’s nice to come back to my one true love in analysis. Our team has come up with some really cool natural language process (NLP) code for this pipeline, and I’m hoping to deliver something equally impressive.

Unfortunately, with this being for a real company, a good half of the data is private. If I’m able to share any of it, it won’t be the full, comprehensive project that all of us have worked on putting together.

This started the first week of June, so as you can imagine, we are about halfway through. Next week, on July 6, will be our midterm, and I’m both nervous and excited about it.

The first half of this program has been the teams coming up with a pipeline to dashboard, and then the second half will be finding and correcting errors, putting the best of both together and delivering a final, well polished version.

The same phenomenon that happened in my portfolio builder class is happening in this program, where we all start kind of quiet– or at least I did– and then as we dig deeper into the problems, we get more active and interact and communicate more. We’re getting a good feel of where we are and what else is left to do, so there are a lot of questions.

So far I’m having a lot of fun with this. I think what I’ll try to do is maybe find a similar dataset I can create a close replica dashboard of. There’s bound to be new things on my Tableau page in the next week, but all of it will be public data we could easily get access to.

I have another fun personal project I wanted to post about, that’ll come next week, and then I’ll make another post on this program when it wraps!

This really has been such a cool and unique look into working in a team with other people on a problem and I really love it. I’ll say, I can work in a team or individually, and I love both. Especially when my teammates are all as excited as I am. That tends to be a plus.

Whether you’re a repeat reader or you’ve come here for the first time, thanks so much for reading and sticking around for everything I have to say. I’m trying to write weekly again, either Wednesdays or Fridays, so look forward to that.

I hope your data cleaning is swift and simple, and I’ll see you all next time!