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Thought prepping for my SQL cert would take 6 weeks, it took me 5 months and a lot of tears
When I signed up for the data analyst cert back in January, I figured I would knock it out by spring and start applying for jobs in Portland by April. The videos made it look easy, so I booked study sessions for two hours a night and told my roommate I would be job hunting by summer. Then I hit the window functions chapter and everything fell apart, because I could not wrap my head around partitioning for almost 3 weeks. I rewrote the same query about 40 times before a guy on a Discord server showed me how to break it into small pieces instead of one giant block. Looking back, the old way of learning this stuff in a classroom with a real teacher would have saved me so much pain, but here I am at month 5 and finally passing the practice exams. For anyone who got stuck like this, did you keep grinding the same topic or jump around and come back to it later?
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shanegibson23d ago
Man, I feel this in my bones. I spent almost a month stuck on joins when I was doing my cert, just could not see why my row counts kept blowing up. Turns out I was joining on a column that had dupes and I never checked, so I kept redoing the same query over and over like that would magically fix it. What helped me was jumping to a totally different topic for a few days (I did date functions, way easier) and then coming back with fresh eyes. Honestly the break did more for me than grinding ever did. The window function stuff clicks eventually but it takes that pain first.
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