Foundations of Business Intelligence {Class Reflection}

On January 13th, I walked into my first Foundations of Business Intelligence class, not having any experience working with Tableau or Microsoft Visual Studio. Today, I’m writing because I just finished my last class of the semester, and I never thought I’d walk away with so much experience.

I have learned some important technical skills and concepts in this class. Using SQL Server Management Studio, I worked with databases and learned about SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS. I was able to successfully run ETL using Integration Services on Visual Studio to extract source data, clean it, and load it into a destination table. Moreover, I learned about cubes and how to create them on Visual Studio through Analysis Services. My favorite part of Visual Studio was using Analysis Services to perform data mining through the creation of mining models such as Decision Trees, Clustering, and Na?ve Bayes. Finally, in this class, I learned how to create Tableau visuals like donut and slider charts using dual axis and other functions.

My favorite part of this class was the semester-long group project that involved us finding a dataset and using Tableau to analyze and draw conclusions to some important insights. As a group, we chose the Suicide Rates (1985 – 2016) dataset from Kaggle; first, we cleaned the data and then imported it to Tableau where we were able to create a storyboard of our visuals and present to a panel of judges at the end of the semester. This not only gave me a chance to practice the concepts from class but also provided me with real world experience in Business Intelligence. This project also enabled me to view my growth from the beginning to the end of the semester.

This class has made a huge impact on my life. I went from not having any experience or knowledge in the field to picking up my own project, outside of this class, to analyze the COVID-19 cases in the United States. My professor, Gaurav Shekhar, has provided me with the tools and valuable teaching to help me learn and apply these concepts beyond the classroom. He has encouraged me to think from multiple perspectives, and by giving such an open-ended analysis project, he gave my group the opportunity to take the project in any direction.

Business Intelligence gives a company direction and allows it to make informed decisions. I aspire to be working in this field and learning more technologies as my career progresses. My ultimate goal is to be able to challenge myself daily in my full-time job, just as I did in this Business Intelligence class. The class has taught me more than just technical knowledge; it has taught me patience, resilience, and determination. I pushed myself to learn from my mistakes and focus on self-growth. As I am just a few days away from graduating with a degree in Information Technology and Systems (ITS), I am glad to say that I had a great undergraduate journey at UT Dallas. I want to thank all my classmates and professors, especially Professor Shekhar for believing in me and guiding me as a mentor. I am taking away so many skills, particularly leadership and project management. I am excited to apply what I have learned from this class, along with several other classes, as an upcoming EIO&T Analyst at Citibank!