Teaching Myself Data Analytics

SQL first, then Power BI, then Tableau. No bootcamp, just docs, YouTube, and a lot of debugging.

I was working full-time at UPS on the overnight shift while learning this, and hit the classic wall applying for data analyst roles: one to three years of experience required, every listing.

The real turning point wasn't the course capstone, that one came with the question and dataset already picked out for me. It was an NBA stats pipeline I built entirely on my own, timed to a live season. I picked basketball specifically because I knew the sport well enough to catch a wrong number on sight, so I could actually trust my own QA.

That's where it clicked that data work isn't just analysis, it's schema, storage, cleaning, consistency. Building it forced me into basic Python along the way: functions, pandas, file handling, some scraping, none of it planned ahead of time.

Next up: how that turned into freelancing on Upwork, and why I was bad at it for a while before I got good.