Industry Engagement

My Power BI Journey

Early in my degree, I was fortunate enough to have coffee with an industry professional, and I asked many questions about being a data scientist and if any extra skills would be helpful for me to have. It was highly recommended that I learn Microsoft Power BI. If I learned Power BI, there would also be the opportunity to gain contract work during the university summer breaks. When I started to investigate how to learn Power BI, the Australian Computer Society (ACS) started giving out short-term free memberships to students.

I joined the ACS, and very soon after, they held an ACS Masterclass: The Fundamentals of Power BI webinar. I attended the webinar, and the very skilful Tony Hartigan showed us an overview of Power BI and recommended some extra learning assets. I loved the workshop, and I was hooked. My newest goal was to get Microsoft Certified: Power BI Data Analyst Associate. I used the summer break over 2022/2023 to attend four classes on Power BI:

Power BI Beginner
Power BI Intermediate
Power BI Advanced
DAX

The classes were beneficial in getting an overview of a complex piece of software that requires learning some M and DAX. The real bonus from attending the classes was mixing with people who already use Power BI in their workplaces and talking with them about their typical usage and struggles using the software. It is indeed easier to use Power BI on a familiar dataset. I sometimes struggle to see the direction of the relationships between the entities when it is an example dataset, and sometimes, I find the location of specific attributes challenging because the entities are not designed the same way I would. I think that this is a problem that more experience would fix. I gained confidence interacting with industry professionals from the classes.

I look forward to taking the Power BI Data Analyst exam when I have more experience using Power BI.

Completing the course gave me the confidence to sign up for AWS DeepRacer Student and to do a Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals BootCamp during the winter break. My results in AWS DeepRacer Student awarded me a scholarship to be part of the Udacity AI Programming with Python in the summer holidays of 2023. I completed the summer program and the winter BootCamp, which had workshops with many industry specialists from Microsoft and their industry partners. I am grateful for the industry opportunities available to students.