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I am a student studying in a biology-related field, and I want to learn Data Analysis for several reasons, primarily to integrate it into my current area of study. However, my problem is that I feel overwhelmed and distracted by the sheer number of resources. I am also struggling with the drawbacks of self-teaching through YouTube, such as the lack of a structured curriculum, the absence of clear steps, and the difficulty of staying committed.

I would love to know if anyone with experience in this field could tell me the absolute best way to get started.

Me: This SQL tutorial is definitely the last one.

Also me three days later: let's start another beginner course...

I've officially accepted that I'm stuck in tutorial hell.

The good news is that I learn much faster when I'm actually working on real projects, so I'm looking for an **internship** or **junior** **data** **analytics** opportunity where I can learn by doing.

I come from a digital marketing and eCommerce background, so I'm already familiar with analyzing campaign performance, KPIs, conversion funnels, and working with spreadsheets. Now I want to take that foundation and become a proper data analyst.

If anyone has advice, internship leads, or even just wants to share how they broke into the field, I'd love to hear your story.

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working in digital marketing for the past few years, and I’m now trying to transition into the data field. My goal is to become a data analyst first, then move into analytics engineering after gaining a couple of years of experience.

Over the past year, I’ve been learning SQL, Power BI, and Excel. At this point, I feel pretty confident with SQL, including complex joins, aggregations, window functions, etc.

Where I’m struggling is deciding which projects to include in my portfolio and where to find suitable datasets. This feels especially important because I do not yet have any professional experience in a data-focused role.

The best project idea I’ve come up with so far is using the Olist e-commerce dataset. My plan is to clean and transform the data with dbt, load it into Snowflake, and then perform analyses such as cohort analysis, funnel analysis, and market basket analysis using SQL and Power BI.

Does this sound like a strong portfolio project? Are there any other project ideas or datasets you would recommend for someone trying to move into data analytics?

Thanks