Claire Strickler - Management, Marketing
Claire is a senior at Clemson University studying Management (Business Analytics) and Marketing. She is also a 2019-20 Tableau Student Ambassador.
How did you get started with Tableau?
I first got started using Tableau through an internship I had with the athletic department at Clemson during my junior year. I had previously heard about Tableau in some of my classes but had never had the opportunity to get hands on experience with the software. Day 1 of my internship started with me downloading Tableau, and it was a quick learning curve of teaching myself Tableau on the job with real projects and help from my supervisor. Throughout my first semester in the internship I worked only with building visualizations in Tableau but the second semester I got to begin working with cleaning data in Tableau Prep.
How has learning Tableau impacted your academic track/career?
Learning Tableau has been extremely valuable to me. I’ve been able to use Tableau for class projects to create graphics for presentations to show a more creative view than a basic Excel pivot table. I’ve also been able to use my skill set in Tableau to help me get internships and learn other software. This past summer my internship used SAS VA, a similar tool to Tableau, and I was able to apply what I knew in Tableau to quickly learn the basics of the software.
Tell me a bit about how you became a student ambassador and the work you’ve been doing with students this year!
Last year I recognized a problem on Clemson’s campus when I would work in Tableau in my business analytics classes and other students would have no idea what software I was using. Even those who knew about the software had no idea students had access to free licenses. Despite how popular it is, Tableau wasn’t being taught to any students in my major. My friend and I had been planning to found a business analytics club for this school year to help bridge that gap and provide opportunities to gain experience with different software, so when I saw the opportunity to become a student ambassador I knew it would help grow what the club could offer. As a student ambassador this semester I have carried out two main projects: a general workshop and a finance specific workshop. For the general workshop I went through constructing a basic dashboard and as majority of students had no experience in Tableau it was geared towards complete beginners. The finance workshop was developed specifically with a professor I have been working with throughout the semester on how to incorporate Tableau into his class. This workshop used data specific to the class to show how Tableau could be used to create a balance sheet and income statement and served as the kickoff to their final project.
Do you have any advice or tips for students starting out with Tableau?
The best part about Tableau is how easy it is to get started! It is very intuitive and makes analysis easy. Since so many people use Tableau it is also incredibly easy to find help online. As I taught myself Tableau through my internship I could find answers to nearly every question I had on the Tableau help site. For students just starting out with Tableau, I think the most important thing is learn by actually doing projects with the software. It’s easy to find datasets on websites like Kaggle and Tableau even includes some datasets. Just practicing exploring the data will lead you to discover so many features of Tableau! Finally, Tableau Public is a great resource. Not only can you see all sorts of creative visualizations but you can download workbooks and directly see how they were made.
Connect with Claire on Linkedin.