It's a lot.
Our first day started with Reeno Grummer, the Business Development Director at The Information Lab Deutschland. He talked about the company's vision, mission, market strategy, among other details about the company and its clients.
We then proceeded to "meet" Katharina, with whom we've talked a few times before. She told us about organizational stuff and a couple of things we should do. We got our first logins from her.
Logins, passwords and systems. Niclas came after the lunch break with our Laptops (and mouse, headset, dongle, etc.). That was the neat part. So far so good, right? Well, here it gets overwhelming. TiL works with literally dozens of different systems, all of which need login details. He guided us through it all, but it was tiresome regardless.
For the last hour two other Data Schoolers came to us, Ben and Frederik. The first thing they said: it is a lot. Don't let it stress you. Well, they were right. They also talked about other things regarding what we do as Data Schoolers and answered our questions and doubts. Nice folks.
That was the first day.
The second day we "met" Martin. We all already knew him, because he is in charge of the selection process. He is a very nice and open guy, talked to us a bit more about The Data School and presented what we are here to learn: Modern Analytics. I think this was the most relaxing day so far.
On the third day we got to work with Tableau Prep with Nico. Again we've received a lot of information about the tool and also got to work with it. At the end of the day we tried solving a few exercises, but without much success. No problem.
Because on the next day he was with us again, but now to present Alteryx, my new favorite piece of software. There was a very big presentation, about 100 slides long, but we had breaks during it and also got some hands on activities. At the end we got our first exercise, which was also kinda hard and I still haven't finished it. Noticing our lack of success, Nico realized we needed easier exercises and got us one of the Alteryx Weekly Challenges targeted at beginners. That was a nice quick one, that I got to solve on the train going home.
Friday, today at the time of this writing, was the first day we didn't have to be at the office. I worked from home and think it went decently. Our exercise was to present, for 10 minutes, one of the topics we learned during the week, I got Data Aggregation with Alteryx. We made the presentation and decided against practicing it. That was a mistake for me. I'm bad at keeping track of time when I'm talking, also tried using tools I had no familiarity with for the presentation and it went poorly. At least the feedback we got was good and helpful, hopefully next week will be better.