I’ve taken another break from the Master’s program in Advanced Data Analytics this semester. Data Analytics II was a difficult experience and took a lot out of me. I was close to quitting the program. Even the live tutor I hired wasn’t helping. Not his fault. The pace and amount of R code (and all things Machine Learning) being thrown at me was frustrating and overwhelming. However, the struggle may have helped make the next course more manageable. The professor was also a lot more supportive and better at making abstract concepts more accessible to me. The switch to Python in that class may have also helped.

At about the same time that I started the second course I also started exploring ChatGPT due to all of the buzz. Although it was introduced to the world in November of 2022 I had not really utilized it much in any kind of significant way. I started reading quite a bit about it and then completed the Excel and ChatGPT: Data Analysis Power Tips course on LinkedIn. Chris Dutton’s Excel courses were super helpful to me when I was taking my first Data Analysis course in the Information Science program so I chose to start there. I really enjoyed it and wondered why I waited so long to explore ChatGPT much more intentionally. I then took Ray Villalobos’ “Open AI’s Advanced Data Analytics Intro Course to explore this new option/tool within ChatGPT.

I then ventured out to give a it a try and created my first ChatGPT project utilizing plain ol’ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (very vanilla). Super simple, I just wanted to create something that worked. I created a Texas School Directory web tool and it wasn’t too bad.

While exploring (but not finishing) Scrimba’s AI-Powered coding course, I created a very simple student raffle/selector app. With the help of ChatGPT I added additional student info (gender and grade level) and then the corresponding visualizations that update dynamically as the students’ information is entered. Super simple but I was hooked!