Sabbatical 2018 Week 4: Where’s My Money?

It has become painfully clear that I will never be a data analyst. That’s not necessarily a bad thing considering I already have a job as an educator at a great community college. Thank goodness for that because I’m a little over my head here in my Big Data Specialization from the University of California San Diego. Somehow I’m learning just enough to get by, but don’t ask me anything specific. You really have to be a programmer to use this stuff.

Course 2 was Big Data Modeling and Management Systems and it was very technical. It was all about Big Data technologies, and frankly I’m happy to leave that part to the IT experts. Systems and tools discussed included: AsterixDB, HP Vertica, Impala, Neo4j, Redis, SparkSQL <eyes glass over>. We learned an in-depth knowledge of why big data modeling and management is essential in preparing to gain insights from your data, and knowledge of real world big data modeling and management use cases in areas such as energy and gaming. We also learned about different kinds of data models, the ability to describe streaming data and the different challenges it presents, and the differences between a DBMS and a BDMS.

I some how managed to complete the final assignment for this course, which was to design a data model for a fictitious game: “Catch the Pink Flamingo.” The strangest thing about this whole Coursera setup is the assignments are peer reviewed. I’m awaiting my fate as I type. I wasn’t really clear if what I was doing was correct, but I did my best and submitted the assignment. Then I had to go in and review my classmates’ work. Yeah, right? It looked good. Nothing like mine, but hey, who’s right? I guess we’ll see once my assignment is peer reviewed.

Two courses down; four to go. Then on to the Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization. In the mean time, I’ve reached out to our district IT person in charge of Canvas. I’m hoping to meet with her soon to discuss Canvas Data Portal. ITS has a proposal process when our resources are needed for more than 20 hours, so I have to go to the PMO site which is where a business case can be initiated to start the process. Additionally, the IITGC provides prioritization of business cases/projects for ITS, so I’ll have to cross my fingers and hope my case gets prioritized.

Okay, back to figuring out how to get paid correctly. Hey, Maricopa, where’s my money?