Data Analyst Internship

I love everything data…..

I interned as a Data Analyst over the summer at Michigan Medicine in the Diversity and Inclusion(D&I) industry, and here I pen down my experience.

Working in the D&I industry is one of the most impactful and meaningful things I have done. I was among the changemakers who used a fact-based approach to advocate for change in the organizational culture.

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My role was to gather insights from data and create visualizations to represent these insights.

1. Getting familiar: At the start of the internship, I recieved an introduction to the tools I would use, mainly MS Excel and Tableau. Even though I was familiar with these tools and had used them before, now I was to perform more complicated tasks with them. Let’s say I was keen to impress, and kept trying to push myself very early on, and worried the whole time if I was doing enough. My takeaway is to remember that all the parties involved know you are new to everything, and they expect there will be a bit of a learning curve.
2. Making changes: I was dealing with a legacy tableau dashboard, and it lacked documentation, so the approach was to update, break and fix. Coming from a software engineering background, I missed version control at this point and piled up numerous tableau copies in my system. I lost my mind a few times trying to find the little thing I missed out on or a link I did not click. The best way to get out of this situation is to look at the desired numbers and percentages and compare them with the data stats in excel or jupyter notebook to find the root of the error. My takeaway would be to ask for help early on because it gets the ball rolling faster.
3. Tableau and Excel: Through this internship, I realized how powerful tableau and MS Excel are as tools. Features like vlookups, pivot tables, and Macros allow a lot to be achieved using excel files. Excel files are also popular across many industries, unlike CSV files. Tableau on the other hand can be hosted as a full-fledged interactive visualization dashboard. I used tableau to join the different excel files and to create newly calculated parameters. My only criticism is that debugging it is hard.
4. Wrapping up: Once I was familiar with the data and the tools, rolling out changes was not a roadblock. A major part of rolling out the dashboard was testing the visualizations for different ethnicities, groups, etc. Towards the end of my internship, I was busy updating the dashboard and getting feedback from my supervisor.

Once the dashboard was ready, it was presented to the DEI leads, and I felt proud and fulfilled by my work. I was incredibly lucky with my supervisor because working with her made this internship experience amazing.