Welcome to my crazy data journey
My path to data has been a winding road, and I wouldn’t have it any other way!
Hello everyone! I am a data analyst, data viz and sci-fi/fantasy enthusiast, and now blogger. What better way to start a blog than to introduce myself and my extremely nontraditional path to where I am today.
Since we all love BANs, here are mine:
Number of countries I’ve lived in: 3
Number of times I’ve moved: 18 (plus one week couch surfing)
Number of kids: 1
Number of jobs (full- and part-time): 11
Age: early 30's
So how did I get to those numbers? By not having a plan, and I have loved every minute of it. I have mentors, bosses, and friends ask me where I want to be in five or ten years, and early in my career I always had an answer for that. Spoiler: I am no where near where I said I’d be. And that’s ok. While having some general directions and life goals is important, by sticking to a path you are closing yourself off to other possibilities.
I started college as a chemistry and technical theatre double major. As I took classes in both I realized that I didn’t want the constant traveling that would be necessary for a theatre techie and I didn’t want a PhD in chemistry, so I needed to make some pivots. I liked teaching so I decided to go down the high school chemistry teacher route. Chemistry is beautiful, but hard, and after two years I realized that I didn’t enjoy it nearly enough to put in the work it deserved. My favorite courses were in psychology, but again I knew I didn’t want to go to grad school right away. So after lots of Google searching I discovered industrial/organizational psychology and found I could get a job in human resources with just a bachelors. So I switched my major to psychology and went to my university’s HR office and asked for an internship. I worked there for a year and a half before graduating and taking a job as an HR Assistant.
Skills I still use from chemistry and theatre: how to write a technical story, how to find research to support my data hypothesis, design principles.
While I liked HR, my first job was terrible. So after 2.5 months, when my internship boss called and said there was a full-time role available, I took it. After 2 years thereI decided it was finally time to get my doctorate. I enrolled in Xavier University’s PsyD in Psychology program in Cincinnati. That’s where I fell in love with research and statistics. My most interesting jobs were during this time, doing program evaluations with a social circus company and psychological assessments at an inpatient children’s psychiatric hospital. I finally decided I wanted to do program evaluation consulting (which was great news for me and my professors, because I was a terrible clinical psychologist). So I left with my Masters and started a consulting firm with one of my classmates.
Skills I still use from HR and psychology: My HR knowledge has helped in every job, and now I’m using it for HR Analytics. My psychology and teaching experience helps me connect with people, understand pre-attentive features, understand research and tell a data story, teach/train/mentor, and conflict resolution.
We did that for a year before my co-founder had to take a step back, meaning I had to find a full-time job. I stumbled across a job called “Research Associate” in the Office of Institutional Research at the University of Cincinnati. I didn’t realize it was an analyst role (later the job was renamed to IR Analyst), and I probably wouldn’t have applied if I had known. But I did apply, and got the job. I had never coded a day in my life, never worked with big data, never even made a pivot table in Excel. But I learned SAS, Tableau, institutional research, and data analytics and I learned it fast because I loved it so much. Within 5 months my colleagues were asking me questions instead of me pestering them 24/7.
Skills I still use: R, Tableau, Alteryx, data analytics.
I stayed in institutional research for almost 6 years. After 5 years I stumbled across the #datafam and the Tableau community, and my career suddenly skyrocketed. Not only did my Tableau skills increase 10 fold, but so did my understanding of data analytics and my confidence. With the support of the datafam, I decided I needed to really stretch my skills, so starting this week I take my next steps as an HR Data Analyst at Cox Communications, my first full-time role outside of higher education, and I can’t wait!
If anyone ever wants to talk about nontraditional career paths, please reach out to me on Twitter @NicoleKlassen12. I am happy to talk and support however I can! As JRR Tolkien said, “Not all who wander are lost.” Every step on my journey has brought me to where I am. You don’t have to be a STEM major to be a data analyst. Just bring your authentic self and you’ll go far!
