You Should Learn the Lingua Franca of Data
College students are big on languages. For me, that was Spanish and Portuguese. They opened up the ability to talk to nearly the entire hemisphere. Later I learned to code, an entirely different category of languages that opened up a new set of doors.
Other students pursued Mandarin, or any number of other languages. My college roommate Brad would argue the MCAT counts as a language.
These days, Python and JavaScript have become two of the most popular.
But there’s a language I want to recommend *all* students learn. That’s Structured Query Language, or SQL.
SQL is how the world talks to databases. I call it the lingua franca of data.
Talking to databases might seem esoteric, but data is at the nexus of everything, including all parts of organizations. Take Culdesac. We have folks who work on marketing, engineering, architecture, analytics, operations, etc. At the intersection of all of these is data. If you can master our data, you’ll be able to work across the entire company. And that’s true of other organizations as well.
I see two mistakes students make with regards to data.
- Aspiring data scientists skipping SQL and going straight to Python.
- Aspiring non-technical majors not learning *any* coding language.
How should you start? You could do the Mode Analytics tutorial over a couple weekends.
But if you really want to learn how to work with data, and apply those skills in the context of cross-functional initiatives, I’d suggest working at a fast-paced startup.
And if building better cities sounds like an exciting mission to you, come work with us at Culdesac. We build cities for people, not cars. Here’s our jobs page; we even have an internship that can be a good fit for college students (if you’re able to be in Tempe this fall. My DMs are open.
H/t Lloyd Tabb for “the lingua franca of data.” He convinced me of that years ago and it’s only becoming more true — witness the recent success of dbt.
