let’s go
Growing up I thought I was destined to be an artist.
I only visited and applied to art schools when the time came and there were two giant reasons; 1. obviously I loved art and was pretty good at it, and 2. NO MATH CLASSES. If you would have told 17 year old me that 30 year old me would be working as an analyst dealing with statistics and math and graphs and numbers and explaining calculations to people every day, forget it.
Art school never happened (thank god?). Life had it’s own curveballs and I took an unexpected scenic route. I ended up getting my degree in Healthcare Administration, my first real introduction to healthcare statistics and well.. it still wasn’t for me. BUT I did start working at a pharmacy to pay my way through school and to serve as a foot in to the healthcare industry. Pharmacy turned out to be something I enjoyed and that was even more so when I got the chance to move to Columbus, Ohio and work for the cities Children’s Hospital as an Ambulatory Tech.
Okay here is where I start to finally like analytics.
In order to keep a program running that I was very fond of in the pharmacy, I needed to pitch its need to the higher ups. I knew why I wanted it to stay: better patient outcomes, more opportunity to build patient relationships, and the far more selfish fact that it got me out of doing my every day job several times a week, but I also knew I needed to get a different point across to the leaders with the one thing that really talked; money.
So I ran a claims and reimbursement report from the program itself and compared that to the FTE needs and training costs for the pharmacy staff. I did the most rudimentary, googled to hell excel forecast, to try and argue how it would make money if it would continue (very glad I have no access to that work now cause I’m sure I’d be SO embarrassed to see that chop job now). I met with leaders, told it’s story, and it actually went very well. I felt so accomplished, and never did I feel that dread I felt in school while looking at numbers and getting calculations to work, it was more like a puzzle— which I’ve always enjoyed.
Still it would be many years before I thought this would be a career I could actually do, and it wasn’t until I talked with a leader in analytics at a previous job that I thought it’s something that I might actually be passionate about. That leader had a creative/arts background like me, and sold me on the need for design, art, storytelling in data— all the things that were actually making me feel inadequate as a woman in tech surrounded by men with highly technical minds. I have enough of a technical stack to be dangerous, but I didn’t think I could ever be a high caliber analyst in comparison.
I decided to let that feeling go (not that I don’t still suffer from Imposter Syndrome on the daily) and lean into what I love about data. What it can tell you with images, how it can move people to make decisions they might not have expected, how you can take an eye-crossing spreadsheet and turn it into something resembling art, and how much room there is currently in data roles to make visualization a focus.
“By visualizing information, we turn it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes. A sort of information map. And when you’re lost in information, an information map is kind of useful.”
tl;dr- thank you for coming to my blog and hopefully following along as I share visualization and design tips, publish Tableau challenges, and learn how to be an even better analyst.
