Database 101: May I Join You? (Part 1 of 2)

You’ve read through hundreds of books for research and have a terribly long Excel sheet with data that’s hard to manage; you receive a request for a report but struggle to get all of the data as fast as you’d like; you’ve heard about big tech companies getting rich off your data and you want to know how it’s done. You have been needing databases all along, you just haven’t realized it yet. In this course, you will learn the basics of databases and how they structure your data. You will learn about tables and how linking them with relationships will deliver so much meaning to what you collect. At the end of the course, you will have constructed your own data schematic that you can take to any database platform, even if it’s simply multiple sheets in an Excel file. Requirements: There is no prerequisite knowledge required for this course, it is meant for absolute beginners with no technical background. You won’t need any software to take this course, just a pen and paper or a note-taking app and an open mind thirsty for knowledge combined with a desire for organization. You also don’t mind an instructor who likes to make learning about data and your digital life fun and entertaining. He will be thrilled to have you join him.

Meet the facilitator:
Jeff Heller is the Data and Project Coordinator for the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. He is an art school brat who, through some crazy combination of luck and data nerdery, spent eight years as a personal trainer for Apple where he won multiple awards for his training style, which breaks down complex digital structures into digestible concepts. He is a certified FileMaker Pro developer, one of the oldest and most approachable database platforms, and is the designer of the Humble Administrators Dashboard, a department administration tool that at one point was installed by 10 academic departments across the Princeton campus. He is also the proud creator of six databases made for his personal life including an app that manages his record collection as well as his music podcast episodes, a cruise vacation app on the iPad, even a database he built to aid him and his wife in finding and budgeting for their first home together. Feel free to ask him about this! What Jeff is most passionate about, however, is education. To him, there is nothing more fulfilling than taking a concept that seems impossible to learn and delivering it to an audience who go on to make amazing things with that knowledge. He is deeply grateful to the Wintersession team for giving him the opportunity to take his love of data collection and share it with a wider audience through this course.

What to Expect:
Double workshop (meets twice for 2-hour sessions, 4 total hours of meeting time)

To request accommodations for this event, please contact the workshop or event facilitator at least 3 working days prior to the event.

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