Felly rwy'n gwen i gyd yn fan ar y gwrs helper tynnu ar y gwaith. Yng ngtw wrthwyng arddangos cyfreath cyreudd ar y cyfreet o 2023. Dwi gyd yn gwneud i fan y gwaith dim ein cyfio ar y cyfarwyr. Wrth roi i gyd yn gan ymgwrs ffordd. Gweithio'r amserol meddwl â'r gweithreth yw'r gwaith yng nghymru. Rwyf ych chi'n cyfraedd rydw i gwaith cyffredinol, ac yw'r cyffredinol mewn cyfraedd yw'r cyfredinol i gael gwaith ynghyrch yn cyfraedd Cyflawni Gweithgawr Gweithgawr, Jyllwch i'n gweithio'r cyfrannu o gyllideb. A gweithio'r gyfrannu'n Gweithgawr, Alex i'n gyfalatio. Wrth gwrth dweud yr hyn o'r fathion, rhaid i'n meddwl i'n gweithio'r cyfrannu. Rhaid i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r cyfrannu i'r cyfrannu a'r gweithgawr Alex i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'n meddlunio i'r cyfrannu. ynglyn â ymddangos, rydw i'n ni i gweithio i mi. Rydw i'n William, ymddangos, ac ymddangos cymunigau i'r bwysig yma yw ymddangos yma, ac ymddangos ymddangos ymddangos ymddangos ei ei gweithio'r gweithio gyda'r cyffredin iawn. So rydw i wedi gweld i'n hyffredin am y gweithio cymdeithasol ar gyfer y cyffredin iawn i ddechrau ac erwyddon i ni'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. We're not any old school. Our programs are so flexible. You don't need to click your day job to change your career. You get regular one to one mentorship for not one but two. Industry experts, that's a mentor and a tutor. And if you don't land a job in 180 days of graduation, we refund your tuition in full. That's our job guarantee. For anybody who's watching on YouTube and is interested in the career boundary program, just click in the description below and there is a link to book a call. If you want to book a call with a program advisor and ask questions about our curriculum or anything that we offer, I recommend doing that. Just a couple of house rules this evening. We will be doing a live Q&A at the end. So if anyone's got any questions for Alex, it's your time to get those questions answered. Just drop them on Big Mark or YouTube or LinkedIn. We are screaming across numerous platforms this evening and we'd love to get your questions answered. Alex, I think that's everything. Senegal, it's a super international crowd and I'm going to hand it over to you. Alex, thanks so much for joining us again. Thank you, thank you. I saw somebody from North Carolina, Jermaine. I just want to give that person a shout out. That's where I grew up. So I grew up in North Carolina. I love seeing when people put where they're from because it's like, it's pretty wild. I mean, we got people from Guatemala, London, Bromwick in the UK, just amazing. Thank you guys so much for joining. Thank you guys for hosting this Career Foundry huge shout out. I love this topic. It really has a special place in my heart because I remember six years ago. Let me see. Yeah, six years ago now. Wow. In 2017, when I was trying to make this transition into becoming a data analyst, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. There are now a lot of resources online on YouTube and posts and blogs and whatnot, centered around how to break into analytics and TikToks and things like that that I don't do. But there's a lot of resources now. When I was first starting out, there was not many resources, which as a lot of you guys know, that's why I started my channel. We're going to talk all about breaking into data analytics. I have a step-by-step playbook on what we're going to be doing. We have a lot to cover. I always like doing a Q&A at the end. I'm going to try to not, I could talk for hours. If you guys know me, I could literally talk for three or four hours on this, but I'll try to keep it succinct and we'll make sure we cover every step. Let me see what this next one is. That's me. We don't need to read this, but I like data analytics. Let's jump right into it. We're going to start with creating a career plan because you have to start somewhere. You have to create a plan. What I like to do with people, because I had a mentorship program for a long time before I started my analytics consulting company, and what I would always tell people, I'm like, you can be any step in this process. You can be anywhere. You could be at the very beginning and have never even heard about what data analytics is and you want to join this path, or you could have already learned all the hard skills and now you're trying to get a job. You can really apply this anywhere. I'm going to start from the very beginning, but realize where you're at and what you need to do. Hopefully that's really helpful to you. Here's what we're going to do. Identify where you're at in the process, create an action plan, and then at the very end, I'll talk about timeframes on how long you should try to, or how long it might take you for each of these steps. Let's go on over to the first one. The very first thing I always recommend people doing is learning the skills. It's really, really hard to become a data analyst if you don't have the data analytics skills. It's really tough. These are the skills that I recommend people starting with. Now, as you're reading through it, as you're looking at it, you don't have to learn all of them. That is not a requirement. In fact, I don't recommend you try to learn all of them because that just would take forever. Really what I would start with, I would really recommend starting with SQL. I just think it's so fundamental. It's where data is going to be stored. It's in some type of database, and you can query the data. I always recommend you start with SQL. Learn things like Excel and a Power BI tool as well, like Power BI or Tableau. These BI tools are meant to just visualize the data. With SQL, Excel, and something like a BI tool, you can go a long, long way. In fact, when I got my very first job as a data analyst, I only knew SQL. That's really all I knew. I learned on the job a lot of the stuff I know in Excel now, a lot of the Tableau that I know. In my next job, I learned Cloud platforms like Azure, and I learned Python. I didn't learn all these things at the beginning. I taught myself over the years as they became more relevant in my job. The last thing on this list is chat, GBT, and AI tools. I want to take a quick second just to highlight this one because these AI tools aren't going away. They're speeding up a lot of these things. They're making them a lot faster to use. Take, for example, something like Tableau. Tableau just had a conference. They're announced that they're going to be integrating AI into Tableau. This is going to be a huge part of analytics in the future, just having these AI tools integrated into these different types of systems. Here's what I will say. I don't recommend diving right into AI immediately. Although it's on this list, I highly recommend learning the basics first. Learn the basics of SQL. Learn the basics of Tableau, Power BI, Excel. Learn the basics because what's going to happen is these AI tools are going to go from 0 to 100 really quick. If you don't know what you're doing, if you don't know what it's telling you, it's going to be really hard to actually put everything together and do what a data analyst does. You want to learn the basics first, then start using the AI tools. You can even use some of these AI tools to teach you. ChatGBT can be a really good mentor. That's the first thing that you should be doing, learning the skills. The next thing, learn these skills. I can just say go learn the skills, but it doesn't really help if I don't tell you where to go. Let's take a look at this. The first one is self-learning. You can do this on a lot of different platforms. Ones like YouTube or IT State Analytics. You can learn from ChatGBT, Khan Academy and a few others. You can do paid courses. Typically what I talk about is places like Udemy or Coursera where you can go and buy a course or buy a subscription, and you can actually take it as you go. You can self-pace within a customized course. Then there's boot camps and online schools. This is where something like Career Foundry falls into place, where you're going to pay for a boot camp. What I always tell people on this is I always recommend somebody finding one that has a job guarantee, like Career Foundry. I don't take sponsors very easily. I have a very specific process that I go through. Career Foundry is one of the very few that I like just because it's a good price and they also have a job guarantee. Some of these other ones look into them, but there's a lot of boot camps, online schools that you can look at, but just make sure that they have good mentors because that's really what you're paying for and that they have a job guarantee. That's something you need to look for. The next thing is getting a university degree. This one is by far the biggest investment in both time and money, but can have a big payoff because you're getting more accredited. You're taking a long time to get your education. Here's what I will say, and I've been thinking about this a lot over the past several months. In three, four, five years, will university degrees be caught up with a lot of these new AI tools and advancements that are happening in analytics right now? Probably not. You may get a degree and you may not be as job-ready as some of these other ones. If you took self-learning or a paid course or a boot camp, that has newer information. You really need to look into those things because that is a problem with the higher education as a whole at the moment, as they tend to fall behind. Those are your options for where to learn. I'm going to preface this one. This one actually has multiple reasons why, and building projects is so important. What does it mean to actually build a project? Building a project just means, as a data analyst, you work with data. You have to make insights out of it. You have to make it actionable. You're building this data, and then you're saying to a stakeholder or an employee or your boss or whatever, you're saying, hey, here's what you should do based off the data. That's what building projects is. It's basically giving you some experience without actually having experience. You're practicing these data analytics skills that you just learned, and now you're building projects. Now, why do you need to build a project? There's three different reasons. First, you probably shoot things, you run into issues, and you figure it out, and then you work through it, and you're like, man, I am better because I built this project. The next one is to showcase your skills to potential employers. Now, this number two and number three, because if you look at number three, it says you'll have something to talk about during your interviews. It has two different pieces. One, projects are really great to place on your resume to help you get into an interview, because it can show that you're working on these things. You can show the tools that you're using. Honestly, I've seen a lot of resumes in my day, back when I was an analytics manager, where I was like, man, this is a really interesting project, and I went onto their portfolio website and I checked it out and I'm like, this is really good. The next thing is, especially if you don't have any experience, what's going to happen when you get asked something like, tell us how you know SQL? That's a tough question to answer when you're first starting out. It was tough for me. I would be like, well, I've been practicing and I took a course and I think I'm good enough in SQL. That's a terrible answer. It was, but what I learned is when I started building these projects, I could say they'll ask me the same question. What do you know about SQL? I'll say, well, I know how to do joins and window functions and all these things, and I just built a project taking this data set and I built this project. I can walk through and I can point to that as some experience, as I built it using real data and I built this project. That's the three reasons why I recommend somebody build a project and then put it into a website, which is really good as well. This is the portfolio website that I was talking about. Once you built a project, that's fantastic, but it doesn't help if you don't put it somewhere. What you need to do is you need to take projects multiple and you need to place them somewhere. You can do that for free on a lot of different places. I have a whole video on how you can put it up on GitHub, so you can do that. You can put it up on Wix, on Kaggle, Medium, LinkedIn. These are all places you can place your projects and LinkedIn even has a place where you can go onto your homepage and you can add projects to your profile. When a potential employer or a recruiter goes onto your LinkedIn, they can see those projects. I'm a huge fan of LinkedIn, so I definitely recommend that. The next thing you need to do is build a resume. Building a resume is always difficult. Give me one second while I take a sip. I woke up with a sore throat, so I apologize. Building a resume is always difficult. I have found it probably one of the most frustrating things about just work in general. You have to apply to a job and you have to have a resume.  This looks bad. You need to fill that out and you also need to make it a data analyst-focused resume. How do you do that? The first thing that you need to do is highlight your skills. Highlighting your skills means you want to put SQL, Excel, Python, whatever skills you have on your resume a lot. You want that up at the top, especially if you don't have any experience. I have a degree in recreational therapy, so I don't want to put my recreational therapy degree at the top, because then they're going to see that and they're going to be like, this degree is worthless, which for this field it kind of is. I put that at the very bottom and I just call it a bachelor's of science. I don't even say that it's a recreational therapy. But I put my skills at the top and then I have, if you have experience, you put experience, then you put at the next level and put your projects. This is another place where your projects are going to come in handy. You can have your projects in two different areas and I want to just highlight this because I'm a big, big, big believer in it. Your projects can be an actual section where you say, here's what I did and then underneath it you have bullet points of here's the tools I used or the insights that I got out of it. You can also put in your header a link to your portfolio website. Highly recommend this because then an employer can go and look at your actual code that you're writing or your visualizations that you're creating. They can go and actually look at it. So it's pretty awesome. So those are two different ways.  Now, what do I mean by this? I worked with a lot of, because I came from healthcare. So I worked in healthcare for a long time, then I became a data analyst. So what I did when I was first starting out and I kind of learned this over the years is that that's actually valuable experience. I didn't know it at first. I thought it was pretty useless. It's actually really valuable. So what I started doing was, I've worked with what are those called? HR? No. Healthcare database systems. They're called something. I can't think of it off the top of my head. But I would say I have experience with these databases on the healthcare side. So then when I come in and I'm working as a data analyst on the back end, I can say I already have experience with those systems. I know how to use them. That's really, really useful information. You can do that with a lot of different things. You usually really have to sit down and think how is this relevant data analytics and then try to use that. It can be tough for some jobs legitimately, but a lot of jobs, there is some trends. Now, let's go on to the next one, which is certifications. I'm going to mention certifications and I put this as an optional one here and I just want to touch on it. I personally, I have no certifications that I talk about because I don't think they're 100% relevant or I've ever helped me land a job. So I've taken the Microsoft Power BI data analyst certification. That's one that I actually took when I was in my job and my job paid for that certification. I don't put it on my resume because I don't think it's, it was that helpful back three years ago when I was just like a data analyst. I didn't think it was that exceptionally helpful in helping me find a job. But some of you guys may really want certifications. It helps could potentially help build a little bit of credibility. You have an actual certification. I just am not a huge proponent of it. So if you like it, go for it. You can get that certification. If not, you know it's not a big one, but these are three of the ones that I think are actually useful, are actually worth getting. Although there are thousands of certifications out there, they're just not all really that great. So, you know, take it with take it with a grain of salt. The next one, step number five is to start applying. And this is a very difficult part when I first started, when I was when I was trying to get my very first data analyst job, I can't remember the exact number, but it was over a thousand jobs I applied for. And I was doing that mostly on zip recruiter. I'm trying to zip recruiter and LinkedIn. I think is mostly where I applied and I applied to over a thousand jobs. I think it was like 1200 and I got callbacks for 20 of them and I got offered a job on one of them. And that was a process. I had a whole spreadsheet. It was it was a very dark time in my life, very very disappointing if I might say because it took months and months and months to get there. Now there's a better way to do this.  And I'm sure a lot of that's what a lot of people do because it's very inefficient. Most of these job websites where you're just applying and applying and applying, they get thousands of entries some they don't even look at it, some they just automatically scan your resume and you're like no don't have the experience they get tossed out. So it's very very tough to get a job with no experience or you know, if you're transitioning from a different career, very tough. Here's how I would do it if I were you. The first thing that I would do is always work with a recruiter. Now recruiters are interesting because most of the time they're working in metropolitan areas. They're not going to be working a lot in these rural areas or it's like farm country which is kind of where I grew up in Minnesota like in the middle of nowhere. You're not going to find a lot of jobs there. You can now find remote jobs which is great but even then a lot of these jobs want you to be somewhere near a metropolitan area. So if you don't want to do that or if you don't if you want to stay where you are you can look for remote jobs. There's a lot of companies out there that you can look for online just search remote recruiters for tech and what you need to do is you need to get on their radar. You need to talk with them, you need to hunt them down and you need to find them. Now I'm going to tell you what I did when I first found this life hack which is called recruiters. I went and worked with every recruiter who would work with me at the peak of working with recruiters after my first job I had a year experience. After that first job I was working with about seven or eight recruiters and all of them I was messaging every single week every single one of them I was calling once a week just to see if there were any open jobs. I was a bit relentless because I knew they weren't going to do it for me I had to do it myself. I couldn't rely on them to just message me out of the blue with a job offer. It just doesn't happen so I took it upon myself. You don't have to be like me although I kind of think that's it's a very efficient way to be on people's radar consistently and get new job updates when a new job is available.  A recruiter is usually somebody who's paid for by a company so let me see where I am on my camera. So here's the company. They pay this recruiter to go find an applicant. Now this recruiter just works with the company. They usually don't work they're not inside of the company, they're not part of that company. They're just a third party a third party. Now they're going to come to you and they're going to say hey we have this job at this company for an entry level data analyst position would you be interested and you're like yes of course I'd be interested.  The recruiter is not going to take any of your money. The company is going to pay the recruiter let's say 10% or 5% of your salary. It's just a lump sum saying hey thanks for getting us an employee that we needed. We don't have to do that and that's what a recruiter is. You can cold email and you can cold call as many recruiters as you possibly can. I recommend doing that. I think that's even more efficient than just blindly applying on LinkedIn and zip recruiter. Another thing you can do and this is kind of that second life hack that I found later on maybe like two to three years ago which is using LinkedIn. LinkedIn has been like it is one of the best tools for job searchers. Is that the right word job searchers? People who are searching for jobs. It is one of the best tools because you can go and you can find recruiters through LinkedIn by just searching for recruiters at this company and I actually have a whole video on how to do that. It is amazing because you can search any company. I can go on Amazon right now and I can find ten recruiters who work at Amazon. I could send them a personal message with my resume attached and I can say hey I saw this specific job and you put the job in there. Say I found this job I think I'm a really good fit. Here's my resume let me know. You can do that with hundreds of recruiters online. It is incredible the access that you have to recruiters. All of those things are what I would be doing supplementing also applying on LinkedIn and zip recruiter on those other websites. I just would not only be doing that because it is a tough path to go down. Let's go to the next step. Now we are going to look at timeframes. Give me one more second. Timeframes are really important because you don't want to be doing this process all the things that we just discussed for the next two years. That's a really long time. Most of the time you're looking you're hoping to do this within three to six months. That sounds like a long time but if you really think about it I've been in this field for six years now and it has paid off really well. It's just taken me into a lot of places even before the YouTube stuff.  There's a big payoff. The first thing is learning the skills I think is going to take the longest or most likely will take the longest for most people. If you just focus on the ones that we talked about like SQL, Excel and a visualization tool and you're starting from absolute scratch like you know nothing which I've been there it's tough that can take you about two to three months. It's a really good a good handle on it. There's lots of courses and practice websites that you can use. Those are great places to look and to go use and utilize. If you're trying to learn all of those skills that can take you like six months. If you're trying to learn Python or R or if you're trying to really learn how to use chatGBT or some like an AI tool those things can take you all to really get good at. So be easy on yourself but right around three months or so to learn all the skills and start applying. The next thing is building projects. I don't think you need to spend two three months building projects. Most people can do a project a week. I usually recommend at least having three projects. Five is perfect. So if you can do one project a week and they don't have to be when you're first starting out, they don't have to be complex. Keep it simple. I have lots of guided projects on my channel. You can just watch a guided project and put that on. It doesn't have to be like a senior level analyst or a worthy project. So keep it simple. Keep it small and then you can build from there. That should take about three to six weeks. One week for three to five projects about three to six weeks. Next we have building a portfolio and really what I mean by that is just taking all your projects getting into one place, making it look really nice having a website. If you've never done it before it can be tough. So just find a tutorial and then build that out. It should take about one to two weeks. Then the next thing we have is building a resume. Hopefully this won't take too long. You don't have to start from scratch, just take your current resume and kind of revamp it, rework it for data analytics. You should be able to get that done in about a week but two weeks kind of at the most if resumes are not your thing. The last piece is job hunting and job hunting is like a huge variable. I've seen people and I've worked with people on a job within the first month. They did all the things that I told them to do. Then they started applying and within a month they got a job. It happens but it doesn't happen all the time. It's not super common. Usually I'm seeing about three months to land a job. Now I put one to six months because sometimes it takes people six months sometimes even longer. It depends on where you are. If you're in the middle of nowhere and you're looking at very specific jobs only remote has to be within this pay range, very specific jobs that you're applying for, it's going to take longer. But if you're open to relocating if you're open to taking positions that don't pay as much right away to get some experience which sometimes you may have to do you can get a job a lot faster. There's a lot of different variables and sometimes I lived in Dallas which is really beneficial for me getting some of my first jobs because there's a huge hub of companies and need for data professionals there. So I was in a good location to be able to get that job. If I was in the middle of nowhere today I think it would be quite a bit more difficult to land that first job. Let's go to the next one. And that's actually it. So I'm going to get Will back in here in just a second and I'm sure he's coming but I know that I just kind of got that quick. But you guys can ask me any questions that you possibly could think of and want to know and I will at least have some answer. May not be a good one but I'll have an answer. Thanks so much for presenting this evening. Let's just clue back to this slide. Yeah I think just to start it off I know a lot of people watching this evening are thinking about taking their first steps in the industry junior data analyst positions. How do you think that the industry has changed in the past six years since you've been working in the industry? That's a good question. I'd like to start it off with one of the meteor questions. That's a great question. It's changed a lot. I started six, seven years ago. It was very different. It wasn't as remote focused. I think it was a somewhat lower barrier of entering. Right now is a really interesting time to be getting in because we've seen some layoffs at big tech companies but what I will say is that as a whole overall the job hiring hasn't slowed down that much except at some of these big tech companies which is not where most data analysts work. Most data analysts work at a lot of Fortune 500 companies mid-sized companies and even small companies that's where I started. That's where 90% of data analysts work. They don't work at the big tech companies. I think for a lot of junior people if they're starting out now the difference between when I started and now is that it's just more competitive. There's more remote people trying to get jobs whereas back when I first started there wasn't as big of push for remote work. There's just a little bit more competition at the entry level because a lot of people just want to work remote. If you are in person if you are in those metropolitan areas I think you even have a bigger leg up in getting those jobs because you're in person or you could work remote so you have that flexibility so you can really work where they need you which a lot of companies like. Awesome. I want to also go back to the portfolio one more question from my side talking about portfolios. If a portfolio lands on your table what excites you most when you see that portfolio land on your table? What do you like to see? I've worked with a lot of entry level people like I was a analytics manager so when we were hiring and I had a lot of consultants and a few full-time employees but when I would see one I'd look at their portfolio not a ton had it on there which I prefer them. Some people don't care some people really care but I just prefer them. I would hope they have them. I remember specifically there were a few that came across my table where I'm like this is a really interesting project I go on their website I look at this project and I'm like I have never seen a project like this before it's just really unique on some niche topic I thought those were super interesting because it showed passion it showed a curiosity for just diving into data and so I would see and I remember this guy specifically because we ended up hiring him he had this really in-depth portfolio on fantasy football stats in like part of his process it was all in Python so part of his process was also determining the best position for fantasy football drafts which positions to take first based off different factors all data analysts using data analysts tools and stuff it was just really interesting I loved that I thought it was super cool it's actually interesting you said that because we also in previous career foundry events we've had it in the past where a student has taken a career foundry project and actually changed it and done their own thing and then they've landed a job from that so I think that's great advice too this is the time to get your questions answered for those watching on Big Marker linked in YouTube I'm going to jump in apologies if I pronounce anyone's names wrong that's not intentional I think Mia's got a great question over in Big Marker Alex any insight into how AI might affect this industry in the next few years yes I just so a lot of what I'm going to say I have a I just released a video yesterday that's like an hour and 15 minutes on this exact topic and it goes really in depth but here's I'm going to give you the cliff notes of it I think that AI has a massive potential somewhat not unlimited but a massive potential to transform the analytics and just data industry in general um for job seekers like you and I who are working as data analysts or want to get into data analytics some of the potential concerns that I've seen are things like it's really good at automating things it can work at a really fast pace like a thousand times faster than a data analyst and it's very cheap those are three things that I'm I think I'm concerned about here's what I'm not concerned about here the things that I think are positive for people like you and I trying to get a job I think that AI still makes a lot of mistakes it's getting better but those hallucinations are very real and I wouldn't because I've been a manager myself right so I'm putting myself in like a business mindset I would not want to blindly trust anything that I'm telling me ever I'm almost never going to blindly trust it I'm going to need somebody to dig into the data make sure that what they're giving me is correct go back look at the code make sure the code is correct the data cleaning process you know the whole spectrum that is a that's a one of the bigger pieces that I would say is um makes data analysts extremely useful and very relevant is that as a business owner I don't I could not put multi million dollar projects which is what I would work I work on a million or two million dollar project I'm not trusting AI to do that not right now and probably not for the foreseeable future the next thing that I think is am I talking too much I need to stop no it's great I think this is great I think because I mean AI is the buzzword at the moment so I think please elaborate on this topic all right I talked about it for an hour 15 before I could I could talk longer than that so I don't want to I'm going to try to try to keep it more concise and I think I was going to be the other pieces that you have to think about most businesses and companies integrating AI into their into their world when I was managing a team of six seven people and you know I'm thinking about AI how I would have integrated it because it really wasn't a big thing when I was a manager I would take a lot of precautions because you know I we had a lot of important data that made important decisions and so I would be very careful with implementing it and that could be a year long plus process so I think just in terms of actually getting it into a lot of workplaces at a company level is going to take a long time I think chat GBT has done a pretty good job of integrating at a personal level to speed up workflows but integrating these AI tools into an actual business is I think going to be a lot more complicated than I think people understand especially if you're not a data person right if you don't understand how these tools work how the data flows the data infrastructure all the nuances of the data and you just try to plug and play like I don't see it working well and so I think those are all those are some of the bigger things I think is going to keep a lot of data analysts very busy some of my predictions for the future of AI I think freelancing in AI freelancing as a data analyst is going to become really big and I said that and then a day later Tina if you know her she's a data scientist YouTuber made almost the exact same prediction I messaged her I said hey you just made like the same prediction I did she's like I recorded that video a week ago we had no idea but we had the exact same prediction which is a lot of smaller companies are going to need to start using these AI tools and they do not have the data infrastructure built up they do not know how to use AI tools there's some Joe Schmo in a business and they're like I need to use this to stay afloat so I think freelancing as a data analyst and knowing how to use these AI tools is going to be a huge business you'll see a lot of things like Fiverr and Upwork or small little niche businesses like mine pop up and people are just going to you know start their own businesses so I think freelancing is going to be a big thing because a lot of small companies that have never used this stuff are going to want to use it a lot like hundreds of thousands of companies around the world are going to start having to use these to keep up with the pace so that's one of my predictions another one of my predictions and look at this real quick because I haven't pulled up in front of me real quick so data freelancing I think this was another interesting one that I had thought about that I don't know if anyone else is talking about it but I think it's cool I think that as AI tools get into different departments within a company you'll see more nuanced data professionals something that a data analyst would do except now it's nuanced into that specific department whereas they wouldn't have had that before so something like I wrote this down and I sounds kind of weird but something like an HR AI analyst or an HR AI specialist something that may not even have the word analyst in it but it does that similar work where you're taking HR data and you're finding insights where they may never have done that before but now they feel like you know we need to get into this so you'll see I think you'll see a lot of that popping up in within companies a lot more data centric AI people so that's one of my predictions is that the data analyst title is going to change over the next five years it's going you're going to see more AI analyst you're going to see more data analyst using AI you're going to see people like AI professional or AI AI data I wrote it down the other day but you're going to see a change in the job titles as these tools get integrated and I think they'll come slowly I actually don't think it's going to happen like super quick you'll see like one or two pop up every so often but I think in five years it'll be a pretty good mix of just a data analyst business analyst you know a marketing analyst and then like data AI analysts who you need to know how to use this AI tool or know how to use these types of AI tools to work at that position I'm just predicting AI Alex the analysts popping up on the YouTube is a we'll see but there was one interesting point I think you made there on the having the expertise before and this is something which has come up in some skills workshops that we've done to is that for instance I could write something in chat GPT we know what is nuclear fusion what is this what is that and you know for me with no experience it does look it looks right but you need to have the expertise in the field to be able to reflect on actually what the answer is and you know what's what's the truth and what's not the truth so I think I think you pulled up a really important point there is actually need to be a little bit of a level ahead to see what's wrong and what's right and so let me touch on that actually because what's really interesting is right now you see people like developers who are using chat to build products here there's it's super interesting I've been seeing it everywhere everyone's like I could be a dev tomorrow and they're not that wrong here's why because you can ask chat to build something you can plug it in to whatever ID you're using and you just need some base knowledge of how to use that and you can visually see that your product is working now if you want to go further and you want to make alterations and get out of backend database and do all these other things you have to know what you're doing right but at an entry level or not even entry level but at a very base level a lot of people can plug and play and build something like a dev but once you start getting to the more complex stuff chat you can only kind of recommend things it can only help you can't build that database for you and connect it to your to your front end and build all the UI and it just can't do that stuff yet maybe it will in the future analytics is going to be very similar in the fact that you can build something but something that's different than even dev work is that devs can see it they can visually see this is correct it is working analytics is very in my opinion is a little bit more nuanced because there's a lot of different business use cases so we're going to see people will be able to generate a lot of stuff but is it right that's when you need somebody who knows how to dig into the data be able to use chat gbt in these different tools to validate that these things are actually working and are correct and are not just giving me some random information that makes no sense and doesn't help the business at all so there's going to be a lot of that going on but yes knowing the base tools how they work how analytics works understanding that process is still going to be extremely important to know how to do and especially at the mid level senior level it's going to be you have to know those things you can't just rely on chat gbt or an AI tool and if that's not inspiration to learn data analytics I don't know what is so Alex you're fully in belief that it's a future proof career then I don't want to make that claim I don't think it's future proof in very nuanced areas I think that there are some data analyst jobs out there that should have been automated a long time ago that are just super simple they didn't need to be a data analyst job in the first place there's tools that 5-10 years ago that could have automated that away so I think in the broad spectrum of data analyst jobs very realistically I would say there's probably 5-10% that have a high likelihood of being automated in like 10 years where an AI tool will do most of it they'll just need somebody to kind of maintain it I think that 80%, 90% plus is still going to require data analysts to be hands on doing this work just because there's so I just with my domain knowledge and my industry knowledge that I've worked for the past 7 years hands on I could not imagine any business like my old company is called the Merisorysburg and my old company if they tried to implement AI right now and do that it would be an absolute disaster I could only imagine how much money we would lose from all this business that we were working with using AI and making a mistake and letting and trusting it like I just it would be a horrible move so integrating those tools and then learning how to use them scaling that up is going to be multi multi multi year process and there's going to be a lot of jobs that come up so those 5-10% of jobs that do go away I think will actually be highly will be overly repurposed into different jobs in the future so that 5-10 that goes away I think it will be about 20% upswing with all these smaller businesses freelance jobs and everything in the future so I don't want to just say it's foolproof I just think you need to know the skills know the tools and know your audience and your market so that you correctly align with that so you do have a job and a place to work in the future Excellent answer and I also think I'm just harking back to the AI conversation we were having earlier for anyone who is learning data analytics it is worth while just keeping up to date with everything that is changing in the industry like the career foundry blog just the shameless blog there but also just keeping up and seeing AI as a kind of something to work with as opposed to something to just ignore because it's not going away so it's good to start and for anyone who has been inspired this evening to start their own journey in data analytics I am going to post a link to the career foundry short course on big marker if you are thinking about taking those first steps it's a free start to 6 day short course which will take you on those first steps going back to the questions there was a great question here from Alan over on big marker for those without a technical background what do you think are some of the most important transferable skills that lead to a success as a data analyst So I worked I was blanking on the name for a second I worked with a guy named Sergio and if you follow me on LinkedIn you may have seen Sergio Ramos love the guy I worked with him, he was my mentor he worked in a warehouse using forklifts and stuff like that and he was like I really want to be a data analyst I was like let's do it so he became my very first mentee that I ever had and now he works at PayPal as a data analyst and I say that because it's very much a similar story and here's what I recommend here's what I did with him I said first and foremost you have to learn the skills so he's like alright so he busted his butt just trying to learn those skills learn the skills really well I was really impressed I was like hey you learned this really well in like 2-3 months great job I was like alright build projects so he hustled to build those projects then I was like apply this is where he really stood out he did exactly what I told him to do and what I wish I had would have done and what I kind of talked about earlier which is reach out to as many recruiters as you can bug them until they help you find a job and you have to be kind of like a little bit shameless and he did that and he literally was like every week he'd be like hey just messaged all my recruiters just messaged all my or just called all my recruiters and what not and eventually he got his first job as just a consulting job then he at 6 months after that job he applied for another job got another 6 months he had a year and then applied to PayPal got a PayPal job all using recruiters so if I were you if I were just starting out you don't have any relevant technical experience and he literally had none he didn't even have a college degree he literally just had got out of high school started working in a warehouse is that your passion and your drive and your just your ability to keep going through these steps is really important so he just had a really positive outlook on it he didn't let it get defeated he just kept pushing and when he landed that first job I mean he just worked and he was a hustler like I call Sergio he's a hustler is he just kept hustling and so I think part of his like just a I think learning the skills good resume and working with recruiters super important the other thing I will say especially somebody who is good at interviewing or practice you can practice interviewing have a good personality that goes a long long way especially with recruiters when you're working with them to make sure they don't blacklist you or getting interviews and like talking with a hiring manager your personality goes a really long way so those are the things that I think are most important those are the things that Sergio did that made him really really successful even with almost no qualifications It wasn't the same Sergio Ramos who used to play for Real Madrid was it? No, no different one Sean has got a great question over on big marker if you're looking into becoming a data scientist would being a data analyst be a good starting point? Yeah I get asked this a lot I think that it definitely can be and in fact my third year as a data analyst I was working at Amerisor's Burg they're like the Fortune 5 on the Fortune 500 list they're a huge company and I was working in this data analytics team I was a data analyst on a data science team that was really good at what I did and I started working with the data science team and after about a year there they asked me if I wanted to transition to becoming a data scientist and so it absolutely is possible now I turned that down because I saw the work they were doing and it just didn't interest me I was like I don't want to do this on the rest of my life and it wasn't my thing but a lot of people love data science and so I know for a fact you definitely can do it you kind of have to I don't know if I want to say up skill but you have to change your skill sets as you go so like analytics is very focused on the data collection on the data cleaning pre-processing and then visualization as well whereas data scientists have a lot of data collection and pre-processing for their stuff but they also need to know some of the machine learning models so you have to skill up in different areas but it absolutely can be definitely a good stepping stone I've seen a lot of people do it and message me and say hey I was a data analyst became a data scientist after two years and I was like that's awesome and you know if that's what you want to do go for it and there's some people who become data analysts for life like me I don't see myself changing I've been working closely with data engineers and database developers and really loved building pipelines but you know it just wasn't something I was as interested in that moment so there are you can definitely start with analytics and go from there there are people who have been data scientists and become data analysts it's just different highways you get on and off and you can kind of choose what you want and what skills you want to learn awesome just reading some of the comments YouTube everyone watching on YouTube also Alex's audience we love to see always bring great energy Mandy said that she just saw a chatbot data analyst role so it just goes to show that there's lots of roles going on it's already happening a great question I think here from Salma and it harks back to the recruiters questions that you were answering earlier how do you actually find good recruiters? so recruiters are I'm going to give you a story real quick really quick story and then I'm going to answer that question when I first was becoming a data analyst somebody told me to work with a recruiter never heard of a recruiter didn't know what that was I was very very like perplexed I was like what on earth is this so a guy tells me he has a job offer or a job interview for me I'm like is a data analyst job I was like alright cool this pays pretty good I'm going to meet me at this garage that's next to the building and I'm like oh my gosh I'm going to get murdered and I told my wife where I was going what time I was going if she didn't hear from me in an hour from that time to call the police that is actually what happened I looked back and it was really funny but I didn't know anything about recruiters they were very scary to me it was just a different world I wasn't in the tech world I was in healthcare so just a different world you have to understand that you need to be cautious with the recruiters there are some you need to make sure they're legit but recruiters they can be anywhere I find a lot of recruiters I found a lot of recruiters on LinkedIn so there's a lot of recruiters on LinkedIn like I was saying before you can go online look at a company and search for recruiters in LinkedIn find them and message them so if you find a job a job posting that you really like and you're like oh this would be my dream job don't just apply you apply then you find the company you reach out to the recruiters and say hey I just applied for this tattoo resume I think it would be a really good fit I'd love to chat about this if you have time just a quick note and that can put you on their radar they're going to have 50 other people who apply you might be on their radar and no one else is another thing that I did search for your area so I lived in Dallas so I just Googled data analyst recruiters in Dallas now I quickly found out that sometimes they're called different things they're called technical recruiters they're called there was another term for it but a lot of it was called technical recruiters for the Dallas area that's what I found and then I started reaching out to them and that works as well and you can email, you can call them so LinkedIn and cold calling and cold email are the best ones now kind of a this is something that somebody else did I am not supporting this Will, don't get mad at me if somebody gets mad at you but here's what someone else did he was living up in Canada and he wanted to move to Minnesota which Canada to the United States the job that he had required that he live in the United States so when he was talking to the recruiter what he did was he went online searched for in Minneapolis recruiters that live in Minneapolis where he wanted to go then he reached out to a bunch of them and said hey I live in Minneapolis I want a job he got a remote job from Minneapolis and then he moved so he just went ahead and said I already live there I'm going to be there and he applied and talked to recruiters as if he lived there so you know I'm not saying you should do that but it did work for him awesome awesome also for anyone watching and considering a career foundry data analytics program you're not on the program alone you do get the full support as I said at the beginning of a mentor and a tutor that's our dual mentorship model and we also have a team of career specialists and the job preparation course all behind you to prepare you for getting that dream job in tech so you're not on your own on the career foundry data analytics program I want to pick up on one comment on YouTube which I think is lovely from Hania I just want to thank you Alex I got my first job and your videos helped me a lot we love that positivity and congrats Hania on landing that job now I know a lot of people watching this evening are considering jumping into data analytics or taking their first steps I think this is a very very good question from Cering is it necessary to be good at maths in order to be successful at data analytics at math math yeah you guys say maths which always throws me off I say you guys that's a lot of people they say maths so here's what I'll say I was pretty good at math in high school and I took the algebra in college here's what I found and I'm trying to be super realistic if you know a lot of basic math and you'll learn a lot of it as you try to you learn the skills to become a data analyst if you know basic math you can understand a lot of percentiles you can understand division, multiplication, pendos the basic stuff for an entry level role that's usually enough usually you don't need to know a lot you won't need to know things like linear regression or just some other more advanced stuff typically now in the financial world if you're looking at banking or other institutions within the like fintech they usually rely more heavily on math but I worked in healthcare so my math that I had in high school college was enough for me I haven't really gone way above that except for some personal use cases so I think if if you know the basics you'll learn a lot of functions within excel, within sql within tableau those are if you know those you're going to you'll either learn it or you will not it's not I wouldn't say it's crazy tough understanding data is not always about math understanding data is sometimes a lot more about like the context the domain understanding of how the data flows and then usually the end math that you're using is not crazy complex or if it is there's other people there to help you make sure it's correct so I wouldn't be you don't have to go and get a degree in like statistics in order to be a data analyst at a lot of places although like I said there's a lot of quants which is like extreme it to the nth degree with with needing no math and there's a lot of fintech finance data analyst that do need to know that level of of math so but it's not it's definitely not the majority awesome we've got someone on YouTube Joseph who's doing his algebra homework and wants to now I'm just kidding there's a great question there's a great question here from a circa why does a company hire a data analyst instead of a statistician you know you can do it I've worked with statistician so I worked with two statisticians they were working in our data science team and they were extremely knowledgeable in in creating machine learning models statistics that I mean way above my head in some cases they taught me a lot of stuff but for a lot of the other work they would just be overkill I mean in in fact statisticians at least from because I worked with statisticians at my job and I company that I consulted with not too long ago had a statistician they are just very specific to at least from what I found to making sure fine tuning creating hyperparameters for these models fine tuning parameters creating new equations that will help with so it's very math heavy not that's not always but a lot of statisticians don't have the base level data knowledge or maybe industry knowledge that you might have with just a regular data analyst like me who really knows healthcare extremely well and then I became a data analyst whereas they know numbers really well and then they kind of work with the healthcare data so they're just coming from a different side and wherever that job aligns they would align that if it's a very math heavy job they might hire a statistician if they need somebody to know data cleaning and the domain knowledge they'd hire a data analyst Thanks Alex It's an interesting question that we do get through and from Steven I had 33 years in IT and want to come out of retirement I did some analytics for 15 years of my career can a senior citizen 69 have a reasonable chance of landing a job Yeah it's a really interesting question I just had this talk with my father-in-law so I'm a tiny tangent I'm going to come back, it's going to be on point though My father-in-law is 67 years old and for most of his career he worked with logistics so he worked in just a few different companies working with transportation logistics super smart guy his experience allowed him later in life when he was 65 to work for two years consulting with I think it was like PWC or Bain or one of those big consulting companies he had a lot of really good experience and so they hired him when he was 65 years old and they wanted him to keep working for the next 10 years I say that because I could see somebody like you potentially being in a similar position if you have a really really in depth knowledge in IT and data analytics you really know what you're doing there are going to be people who value that experience even like in consulting companies who really just want somebody who knows the ins, the outs how system should work things that new people coming into the field even senior analysts wouldn't know how to do as in depth as you would know so maybe you don't even go for just a regular data analyst job maybe you go for a chief data officer job at a small company or some higher level manager position at a smaller company where you're more managing than hands-on and fit in I think more that would be my very quick analysis of your situation for those of you also watching on bigmark I'm just going to post a link to career foundries diversity equity and inclusion report and you can have a look if I can post it on bigmark here we go send because I'll post it in the wrong channel in the report you can see the breakdown of our student body I do recommend checking out for anyone who's interested in doing a career foundry program I've just posted a link over in bigmark so do check that out I'm just going to jump into the questions again on bigmark let me go down let's have a look so mumama's asking what career planning advice do you have for someone who is at the beginning of their career in their first data analyst job I suppose this is a pathway question if you just got at your first data analyst job first off congratulations because that's super exciting looking back I think I stumbled upon a good formula I didn't know what I was doing it just happened but if you could actually plan it out that would be better here's what I would probably try to do it depends on what you're trying to optimize for are you trying to optimize for salary do you want to make as much money as you can within a short time do you want to optimize for comfort do you want to work remote really I would be jotting down what's most important to you in the beginning of my career it was all about money because I was broke so I really needed to optimize for money but then after about three years I needed to optimize for remote work because of COVID and I had three kids so knowing what's important to you is really important but really what you can do is after about a year of working as an entry level data analyst at one year you can then start trying to apply for mid level roles now excuse me drinking too much water what a lot of people think or kind of the old school way of thinking is oh I need to work at a place three, four, five years and about five years on a mid level analyst how it works in at least this field or hasn't for probably the past ten years things move really fast and you learn a lot of the job and your skills become a lot more valuable to an employer when you have actual hands on experience at a company so once you get a year experience you can then start job hopping if that's what you want to do you can go to another company get a year there in a different field or the same field job hop and get probably 20% to 40% pay bumps if you do it right that's what I was looking at with mine I was doing about 20 to 40% for each pay bump so if you're optimizing for money that's a great way to do it but you should really be writing down what do you want to do in two, three years because it's a short lifespan a short transition to the next stages of a data analyst, mid level, senior level you can get to mid level one to five years somewhere in that range senior level four to eight years so you need to start planning what do you want to optimize for and then try to follow that that's what I'd recommend for those people who are studying data analytics and they want the highest salary possible after learning data analytics what would be the avenue to go down if you wanted to hit the highest salaries what would you specialize in this would be I don't want to say controversial I think other people have different opinions that's what I'll say my opinion is that I would optimize for an industry I think industry knowledge especially in the coming years, five, ten years it is going to be more important to know domain knowledge than ever before because of AI and knowing these tools I think domain knowledge is just going to be probably one of the more important things technical skills in your domain knowledge for sure I would be specializing in a domain finance, construction agriculture, whatever it is become really really good at it I think that will lead to more money in the long run now if you want to make the really big bucks you're looking at things like consulting working at big tech companies or really focusing on that domain knowledge so you have different avenues but I think the most the quickest way to get there as well as probably the easiest way to get there is specializing in a domain if you try to go to Amazon right away to get a big salary it's going to be really tough to break in because it's just a lot of people who work there a lot of competition so that's what I would do I would recommend finding an industry that you like becoming really good at it I think that's going to be really important in the next several years awesome another question also when you're a data analyst and how much does strategy come into play so you've got the company data you see that there's some problems you visualize it, you present it to the company do you also stand there in the boardroom or in the meeting and say look this is what's going on with the data in the company and these are potential solutions or are you just delivering the message yeah so I have different experiences at different companies in different positions I was a data analyst at a very small if under 50 people healthcare analytics company with that job I mostly reported to the clients and I mostly reported to my boss so my boss was he was the director of analytics so I mostly reported to him when I worked at the fortune 500 company when I was just a data analyst I had just broken in we worked at a larger team at the small company I was just reporting to one guy at the at the Merisores Burg and I was working as a team of about 12 people so our team would come together and I usually present to the whole team because we were a part of a long process of the data collection process, the data cleaning process transforming it doing all that stuff creating the visualizations, we had a person for everything database engineers database developers visualization specialists, we had the whole gambit data scientists and we would then report up to the program manager who then we would present that to them first then we would present that to either my manager or my manager's manager who was the senior director of data science and after that we never went higher than that. Now in my last job I was an analytics manager I reported directly up to the CIO and the senior vice president of IT so I think it depends just as a data analyst you're typically at a small company's reporting higher at smaller companies you're reporting like one or maybe two levels above and then as a manager I was reporting up to the highest and then everyone in between because of just how my role was so I was reporting to really everybody or presented to really everybody Awesome thanks Alex Just going back quickly to the career found data analytics program because some people are asking about the length. If you can devote 30 to 40 hours a week you can complete the course, the program in four months and if you can devote 15 to 20 hours you can complete it in eight months just to clarify for anybody who wanted to know that. Alex thank you so much for hosting another fantastic presentation this evening also thanks so much to Alex's crowd and I would also just like to say quickly to anybody who's watching from career foundry do subscribe to Alex's YouTube channel over it's Alex the Analyst it's currently at 470,000 subscribers and we want to get it to 500 so do go over there and subscribe we've got to get to 500 by the end of 2023 it's a combined goal but yes thank you so much for all the great questions all the engagement this evening for anybody who's watching and is interested in data analytics also recommend checking out the career foundry blog I'm just posting a link over on big marker there are some very specific topics on tools and salaries but there's also some more general topics there on soft skills transferable skills and jobs in your locality that kind of thing so do check it out we've got a great team of editors working at career foundry writing these articles and they would love for those to be read also do check out the career foundry YouTube channel you can see previous that we've done over there but you can also see members of the team who've been interviewed and people that we've interviewed alumni do check that out there are some familiar faces especially in the data analytics section so I would recommend going over there especially checking out the videos from Tom Gadsby who is the senior data scientist here at career foundry he's got some great introductory YouTube videos so do check that out and last but not least if anyone is considering a career change and is thinking about career foundry are currently offering career change scholarships worth up to $1,125 or 1,125 euros off the full price of the program to get that or to apply for that just book a call with the program advisor if you're on YouTube click the link below in the description or if you're on big market click the sticky note and speak to one of our program advisors they're lovely and I know them all personally and they can also answer any questions that you might have about the dual mentorship model the curriculum, job guarantee things and they're waiting on the calls now Alex thank you so much are we going to see you again this year probably I hope you'll have me back I love doing these webinars I hope so we're going to find a topic we're going to find a really juicy topic so we're going to get you back on the channel but thank you so much for spending your time this evening and that was a great presentation and thanks to everybody who joined us from all over the globe great international crowd and a great evening so thank you everyone and see you next time


Okay, welcome everyone. I guess we'll start with some introductions. I'm Sylvie and I attended BHS, graduated in 2019, and I'm joined with Nora who goes to BHS now and is going to answer some questions for us about what it's like to go to school there. Okay guys, hi I'm Nora. I'm a junior at Burlington and I also attend the Tech Center which is kind of close to the campus but not really on it. And I'm a three-season athlete. Wow, what do you do? I play hockey and field hockey and tennis. Oh awesome, to get transition is like what is the sport situation been like with all the fields are still at the old BHS and busing and everything like that? Yeah, most of the underclassmen, since they can't drive, they hop on the bus right after school and then they just take it down to the field and a lot of practices start at like 345, which our school gets out of 315. So sometimes they're a little bit late but if they're able to like get a ride with some of the upperclassmen, I think it's fine. But it is kind of a little bit of a commute. I think it would have been really nice if our school was attached to the fields but it's okay. Yeah, yesterday I had a tour of BHS with the principal and she was saying that a few days ago there were some people practicing on the field at BHS and they had to do a shelter in place because of the thunder and lightning but there was no place so they just had to get on the bus and go back to BHS because there's nowhere inside where they can go when they're at the fields besides like maybe the bathrooms and the locker rooms. Yeah, and even the bathrooms, they're not even open like all year round. I think right now they're locked because if the water is not running then they just like lock the bathrooms. Yeah, so there is no shelter at the field so when it's like thundering, I guess kids that didn't have cars or cars had to hop back on a bus and they like went and did a class of like what's it called when you watch your game? Films. Yeah. They did films back at the old school or the new school. Yeah, brand new. Yeah, I mean I guess that makes sense. Are you still able to like host home games? Yeah, we totally do. We had like four games this week. I'm actually shadowing the trainer at the field so that's really fun. We still have a trainer and like all that good stuff and we do track meets. We host everything still. There's nothing that we can't really host because we're remote-ish. What about basketball? Yeah, that's a good one. The basketball since our gym is now off limits, the boys and girls play at UVM if they have open gym space or St. Mike's for their home games, which is kind of cool honestly. Yeah, it was really fun for us to get to go into those spaces. But yeah, so it was like a very tight schedule and the practices were pretty late at night for them during the regular season because of the UVM kids that actually have to practice there. Yeah, that makes sense. So I guess let's just start by kind of explaining what the downtown BHS is, Burlington High School, and I guess talk kind of about what it's like to go to school there. Okay, well there's no windows so it's kind of a hard environment to like focus in if you're an outdoorsy person and the lights are very bright. Like when you walk into a mall and the lights are really harsh, those are the same lights since they never actually changed them. And then some kids actually wear sunglasses inside just because the lights give them headaches, so I think that's kind of funny. But we don't have walls that go all the way up to the ceiling so that it's kind of echoey and loud, and you can hear multiple classrooms as you're in the same classroom. Someone bands playing, it gets kind of loud, but yeah. That can be distracting, but I think a lot of us students have adapted to it, like you adapt to everything, but it doesn't really bother me anymore. It's just kind of a safety issue when it comes to not having walls if we go into lockdown or anything. Yeah, that makes sense. Does the overall, I mean I know being downtown is kind of like there's a lot going on around the school, so is it like do you feel like it's a safe place? Like I know yesterday on the tour they were mentioning like just church street and the bus stop and there's a lot of really busy areas right next to the school. Yes, totally. Especially the bus stop that's really close. It's free transportation right now, so there's a lot of homeless people in Burlington, and sometimes they're like not trying to harass, but you get harassed a little bit. As a freshman at a high school, you're not really used to that yet, used to going downtown by yourself, but I think a lot of the students got used to interacting with them pretty quickly because it's so frequent, and we have a security guard that's right at the entrance and we have to show our IDs as soon as we walk in, like even if he knows you, it's super strict, so that's good. I feel really safe in my school, but that's good. Is there just one entrance? There's two, or no, there's three entrances. One of them is locked from the outside and you can never get in. Another one is from the garage, the parking garage, which I think we should talk about too, because that's really important, but that one is also locked unless you're a teacher. You can like buzz in and they can skin your ID, but a lot of kids are like in and out throughout the day, so there's normally kids around there that will let you in if you're in a rush because if you can't get in from the parking garage, then you have to walk up the hill and go all the way around, which is kind of annoying. It takes like three minutes, which if you're late to school, it's an issue, but the front, you have to buzz in and they'll unlock the doors and then we have our security guard right there, so it's pretty secure. Yeah, that's good. I know at the old VHS there was like probably 15 doors, like entrances, places where you could get in and you could kind of like just snake your way in and out of anywhere, and a lot of kids had to, because it was, well there was five buildings and then there's ramps between each one that were above ground, or not above ground, but like bridges, and the only way you could get to most of the bridges is if you took stairs, and so students who are handicapped would have to go outside and around to get from building to building, which was just so unbelievably inaccessible, and so VHS... Oh, that worked in the winter times. It was just we had to be careful, and I think that's why I think in 2019 there was a bill passed for a new school to be built, which obviously then got pushed around because of everything, but yeah, we really need it. Yeah, that was incredibly inaccessible. I think another safety feature is the fact that our school is so small, and we have a lot of our guidance and student support right in the middle of our school where the escalators are, so you can see the student support teachers right there as you're going up the escalator down from class, and there's always teachers around supporting you, and I don't know, there's always eyes on you in the building, there's not really anywhere you can hide, so I think that's another good thing because it's helping kids from skipping class, probably. Yeah, I mean it's got to be like a fifth of the size of the old one. It's very small. It's just one building, like there's no where you can go. Yeah, so I don't even have like a gym, so. Yeah, I saw the gym, it looks like a little like CrossFit, like it's just like some mats and workout equipment and four square. P.E. looks very different here than what I heard about the other Burlington, but most of the time if it's nice out they're just going down to the waterfront, playing like games down there, or they walk up to the YMCA and use a group fitness room to do a workout. That's awesome. I mean, that makes sense. You're right in downtown, and yeah, so that's a good use of the resources that we have. Yeah, definitely. The location does give us so many opportunities. Yeah, so what's the parking, like the parking garage? Where is it? The parking garage is connected to the hotels around and our school, so we're in the middle of the hotels in the garage, and so at the beginning of the school year they said they set out like an email that was talking about the cost of parking because it's not free, and the first initial email was that it was going to cost $270 for the school year for someone to get a parking pass, and my initial thought was I will take the bus.  It was just not approachable for any student. So they lowered it to $160, and still I was not really happy with that, so I found a way to not get a parking pass and still be able to drive to school, which the parking garage people kind of got a hold of recently, and they realized that kids were cheating the system, so you could do two hours of free parking in the app, and then after the two hours was up I would do it again and then again until the school day was over, but they figured out that now once you put your license plate in and the two hours parking free you get it once in one day, and then it started charging me, so I've been parking like on Elmwood Street, which is three blocks, four blocks away from the school, which is kind of a far walk, and it goes past some isolated parts of downtown Burlington. It takes me through the bus station, which is a pretty busy space, and it takes me through or past the new homeless shelter pods, which sometimes can be pretty quiet, but sometimes it's pretty busy around there, so I guess sometimes it's a nice walk, but yesterday I didn't have a great experience. I did end up getting followed for three blocks, yeah it was kind of freaky, but that's a personal choice that I decided to park where it was free instead of getting it passed. Yeah, I mean that's pretty, I don't really know, I couldn't have paid that when I was in high school. That's pretty ridiculous. It's just frustrating to know that the schools surrounding are paying like five dollars for a parking pass for the whole year, and we're spending, I mean I've spent 45 dollars in parking tickets this whole school year. That's really hard. Would you say that that's one of the most frustrating things about the new school? Yeah, definitely for me. It's just the parking tickets really, oh you come out to your car after a long day of school and you have a ticket on your car, it's so frustrating. I think, I wish I could remember how much it was for a pass at the old BHS, I think it was like, I want to say like 45 dollars. I was talking to other friends at other schools surrounding us about it because I was so frustrated when I heard that it was 270 dollars, and they were telling me that theirs were like 15 or 10 or five dollars, and so that was just like wow. But I had three older siblings that all went to Burlington, and a lot of them, she did the system as well I think. My mom used to work at Burlington High School, so she had a sticker, and my brother removed it from her car. Oh yeah, that's smart. I think he got in trouble one year though. Yeah, well they figured it out eventually, but like you said, you can have like a month or two of glory sometimes. So what would you say like the attitude of like the students and the teachers has been towards this transition from the old BHS to the new BHS? In the first two years, the teachers definitely were having a hard time like adjusting to the new space, and my sister graduated last year, so she was there for her junior and senior year, and I don't think she loved it. Yeah. She definitely missed the old school, and I think it was harder for her to like want to be in class there because it was just, it seemed so boring. Like when we first moved in there, all the walls were just white, there was no decoration, it didn't feel like a school, but since like we've been there for now 43 years, we've added a lot of like personality to it, and I don't know now it feels, it definitely feels like Burlington High School to me, I don't think of it as Macy's anymore. Yeah, except maybe the escalators. That's a funny point. The escalators are normally broken, so when you have a staircase, which is in the corner of the building, so it can kind of take a while to get to class if you have to get to the stairs, but everyone's always like so jealous about our escalators, but I think a lot of the kids really don't like the escalators. Yeah. Yeah. Do you feel like this is going to be like a proper high school experience? Like do you feel like you're going to be like satisfied with the downtown BHS? I think it's hard for me to answer this question because I'm in the tech program now, so I'm not in downtown Burlington often as other students are, but I am loving high school. I think it's, I don't know, I have nothing to compare it to, but maybe like when I go to college and I hear about other kids' high school experiences, maybe then I'll be a little bit jealous, but my friend started at Burlington her freshman and sophomore year, and then last year she transferred over to CVU. Oh yeah. And I've been hearing all about her CVU, like drama, friend groups, and all the like the fun sports, they have like, they take sports so seriously at CVU, right? And like all the games they do, and I'm just, I'm a little bit jealous because I'm, they have a huge like campus to be on during the day, and a lot of work, like a variety of classes, they just have a bigger student body too, so, and they have their fields right next to the school, so I guess that makes me a little bit jealous, but being in high school every day kind of don't have anything to compare it to. Yeah, I guess if you have like proper classes and teachers and classmates and friends, then you know the building probably isn't, doesn't impact the experience too much, but I know having the fields far away does, especially as a three-season athlete seems like maybe that would impact it a little more, but do people from other high schools, are they like jealous that you're on like near Church Street? Yes, I think that they are, but only juniors and seniors have privileges to leave campus, and because it's kind of a health, or not a health concern, a safety concern, right, but I think that a lot of the students don't really listen to those privileges, are gone anyway, they don't have that much time to leave because their lunch is only 20 minutes or less, but I don't know, most people can make it down to like Church Street, the bagel shop in back in time, so yeah, I know sometimes I'll be just like on Church Street in the middle of the day, and I'll see like high school students with their backpacks on, and I'm like, oh, they can just like wander on up here, I guess if they're an older student, are they talking to you as students at all about the new VHS, and like the, when they're building right now, and what that's going to be like, or I think it's going to be three or four years before it's done, maybe? Yes, it's going to be a while, so it doesn't really affect the soonest it'll be done in three or four years, so yeah, it's not going to affect my high school career, and there's no one else in my family, I'm the youngest, so I don't really, it's not going to affect my family really, but I haven't really heard that much about it because it's not affecting me right, but like my best friends have little siblings, and so I think that they're going to get excited to go to this new school, it looks like it's going to be fancy. Yeah, one of my friends at UVM is on the team of people who's building and sort of constructing it, and I was kind of trying to get some info out of him and be like, is it going to be like super techie and fancy and new, and it sounds like they're putting in some work and time to make it that way, which makes sense, you know, I feel like Burlington is so new, or I guess that's not the right word, but they're kind of like innovated, yeah, and they want to be like on top of things, yeah, yeah, and so I feel like the old high school in the North End didn't really reflect that at all, you didn't really feel very Burlington, so I think it's awesome that they're getting a new school, but it sounds like probably no one who's at attendance of downtown Burlington right now will get to go there, even if they're freshmen. Yeah, it's kind of a bummer, but I think that a lot of the kids at our school are loving our new downtown location. It's more central for Burlington, because there's people that come from like the super south end, is that what it's called? I don't really know. Yeah, like down by like red blocks, yeah, oh yeah. That's so far from where the old BHS was, if they didn't have a car and they had to take the bus, that would be two bus rides. Really? You'd have to make a connection at the bus stop, right? Yeah. But now that it's right next to like the bus terminal, there's no, there's no like connections that anyone would have to make, no matter where you live in Burlington, so it's a pretty direct route to school. Yeah, well I remember I lived down, not quite as far as red rocks, but in the south end and my drive to BHS would be like, would traffic like 25 minutes, like pretty far. Yeah. And you know, trying to find a ride and like someone who doesn't have to backtrack and so I think that having it somewhere more central kind of makes sense, but I mean, they have the area that they want, so. Yeah, it's a long ride to school, especially for a city, it's small. Yeah, I know. It doesn't like, it doesn't sound possible. Yeah. But just everyone's getting up and going somewhere at that time and I guess usually maybe we would make a few stops to pick up people, but still, yeah. Another change we made from moving, I don't know if it was moving schools exactly or COVID, but they started to begin school at 9 a.m. every morning instead of, I think it was like 9 05 or 8 05 or something. Yeah. So that's a big difference. It's a whole nother hour of sleep. Yeah, that's really nice. Yeah, classes are way shorter, so I think that there's more homework because of that, but you win some, you lose some. Yeah, that's nice. I guess some more specific questions that I was just curious about is where are events, like if you had a dance or a theater play go on, where would those be? Our homecoming dance was, I think, oh my gosh, where was it? I think it was at Edmonds Middle School's Jam. Oh my gosh. Yeah, so we have to be pretty resourceful and look around, but our winter ball was at the Hilton. That's right on Battery Street, so pretty close to our school, parked in the same garage and everything. And then our prom is at Champlain College, so that's going to be really pretty. We don't have pep rallies, which I think I would have loved to have, but I never experienced one, so I don't know what I'm missing out on, but it sounds right up my alley. Yeah. If we have a school and meet like assembly, which we don't really have, but maybe like one a year, we rent out the Flynn, which it's like a whole event. We have to walk over. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. Like a migration. Yeah.  And again, it's just like there is so much around. Like, thank God it wasn't like the Macy's wasn't like where like Sears was. You know what I mean? Like, obviously that's South Burlington, but it seems like as the placeholder that it is, the location works pretty well, since there's so much that they don't have like as in like extra space for like assembly rooms where all the students can fit. Yeah, I agree. I think that the community also like has adjusted to the fact that we don't have all the things other schools have, and they're like willing to arrange dates with us to like share their spaces. Yeah. So I don't know. In a way, I think that this has made our community stronger. Yeah. And is there there's no like outside spaces where you can hang out, right? No, we have no outside spaces on campus. But I think this year, our student government is trying to work on building like an outdoor lunch space on top of our parking garage. Oh, I mean, it might not work because we don't own the parking garage. The study of Burlington does. But we have to like get that permit and then they're going to put some picnic tables up there maybe, and they wanted to put like a little greenhouse up there, I think. Yeah. Which would be cute. But cars still park up there. So it's like, how can you do that? I don't really know. Yeah.  So I mean, like, what's that one level? Yeah. But that would be really cool. If that happened, I guess like overall, like, what's like one thing that like has surprised you that you like about the school? If it's something that we haven't already touched on her? Um, I like how the tech center is like right down the street. It makes it really helpful quick and sufficient for me to get back and forth. I also really love the location. And I think it's amazing how it's so central to Burlington so that everyone has like a fair trip to school every day. And I don't really think that the fields being far away is that big of an issue since we have free bus passes and everything. Yeah, you can still get them there at like somewhat of a reasonable time. And most kids like are willing to drive other students if they have their six months or if they care about the six months. Yeah, rule, their license. But yeah, so I don't know. I think that it's been a little bit challenging for some people. But the transition like, in total, I think it's just been a growing process. And like, as you become an adult, there's more challenges in your life. So I think this is just like adding on to that and teaching us some more skills that we can use after high school. Yeah. Do you want to like explain what the tech center is and what the different programs they offer are? Yeah, definitely. So Burlington Tech used to be in the, I think, on the side or the basement of the old high school. Yeah, I don't really know. I bet you do. It was in like an F building, which was sort of set to the side a little bit, but still connected. Okay, cool. So it was connected, but maybe a little bit of a walk. And now it's not connected because there's no space in Macy's. It's pretty small as of holding a whole school and compared to the old school. But so our new tech center is under Walgreens. That's kind of funny. But it's on the same street. It's like a block and a half down from our school. It's not that like sketchy of a walk. And since we all walk together at the same time, it's not bad at all. But I like it. It's there's no windows again. So that's kind of an issue for me. At least I get to go outside for the walk over. The health science or the program I'm doing is the health science academy. And it's just like basic anatomy one and two and then human growth and development and that stuff. But there's a really cool program. If I was like a techie kid that loved art, I'm not good at art. So that's not me. But we have a really cool like design and illustration program, which kids love. And that's in the same building. And there's criminal justice in the same building. And then an intro to health care. Yeah. And I think there's one more. It's, oh my gosh, maybe digital producing. Yeah, I'm not sure if that's right. But they make music. Oh, cool. They make movies and like stuff like that. That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, I feel like they're all like super specific, which is great for kids who know what like something that they love or even if they don't know they can try it out and have that much more of an understanding of what they like or don't like before college. Yeah, definitely. And then I think there's a few more that are off of that campus. Because I think there's like an automotive. Oh, yeah, there is. Yeah. Maybe in like aircraft. Wow. I don't really know. Didn't have that one. Yeah. That one's like, close to where beta technologies is at the airport. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of a cool opportunity for kids like that. Don't want to do that. I don't know where the automotive is, though. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it was we had like a whole, the old BHS had so many, like almost random facilities, like they had like an automotive shop, basically, like where you could learn to do all that. And like, we had a jewelry studio and like places, I'm trying to think of some of the other like super niche stuff that was in the school. But I mean, I'm sure that they've you guys had like a cooking class, right? Yeah. Yeah, we don't have specific classes like that because there's not space. And our art classes are pretty simple. Like, I guess you guys used to do like fine arts with like metals and pottery, maybe you had some pretty cool art classes. Yeah. Now, like after you take art one, I think your options are like nature painting. Yeah. It's pretty much the same thing as art one. Yeah. And there's no pottery or anything like that. That's definitely a bummer. But at least if people know what they want to explore, there's like digital and tech stuff, which is awesome. I mean, that's all of the questions that I have.  Or do you feel like we covered everything? I'll say one more thing about like the lunch. Oh, yeah. Because I think that or I've heard that the old Burlington used to have like an incredible lunch setup.  So now our setup is like the super tiny kitchen or there's it's not even a kitchen, they have to import food from another, I think elementary school and the middle schools they bring food from and they put it in warmers and then we get it and it's like lukewarm. Yeah. So there's like a salad bar. It's pretty simple, nothing extreme like our middle school salad bars used to be so much better. Yeah. But we have that and then normally we have pizza from Domino's like every single day because we have no food and it's the only thing people will eat. Yeah. So yeah, we have that, which is a good thing for us, but I think kids are getting tired of it. But that's like another reason why our location is so helpful because we don't have that amazing food for lunch every day.  Yeah. I know that there used to be a program where students could get breakfast, lunch and dinner like while they're at school and do they still do that for students who like maybe didn't have enough money to be buying food or have food at home? They still try to do that. I don't know if the meals are as sufficient. Yeah. But the breakfast is I think baggies of food. I'm not really there in the morning, so I've never seen it. But I think they're pre-packaged bags, maybe with like a slice of bread, a juice box, an apple. Yeah.  But it's something. And then I think that there's an after-school snack, not a dinner or anything, but the snack might be like it's another pre-packaged baggie. Yeah. Which I'm not really sure what's in it, but it's nothing that would fill you for the whole night. Yeah. Well, I think that's all that I have to ask you and really, really appreciate you coming here and telling us about it. I feel like I learned a lot and it was really, really interesting to hear your perspective. Yeah. It was fun to talk about. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you. Yay. Problem. Yay. Bye. Bye.