A Team Experience | Graduate Spotlight

Parker Hanna of Full-time Data Analytics Cohort 6 was working as a Customer Experience Associate for Lyft. When the pandemic affected Parker’s momentum in his role in 2020, he decided to “pick up some speed again” by gaining new skills in the Data Analytics Bootcamp at Nashville Software School (NSS)!

What was your favorite part of your NSS experience?

“I was skeptical about going into a remote learning environment, especially coming from a remote work role that left me feeling isolated and disconnected from my team. The NSS experience is very much a team experience, and allows you the opportunity to develop real friendships, learn from each other, and network in a way that feels decidedly ‘non-network-y’."

What was the topic of your capstone and how did you choose it?

“For my capstone, I wanted to utilize Spotify’s API - which includes musical features measures for every track in their library, such as acoustic-ness, energy, danceability, etc. - to create an analysis of the music of the Beatles. I wanted to go further than just looking at the band as a whole, however, by extending the analysis to the Beatles as individuals, and also uncover who the most popular Beatle is (according to Spotify) along the way. This is where it gets tricky: the Beatles had multiple songwriters, but even when one Beatle was the primary creator of any particular song, it would be credited simply as “Lennon/McCartney.” By web scraping Beatles fan sites, I was able to unpack this ambiguous credit and attribute every song to a particular Beatle, allowing for a comparative analysis of each member. I further take a look at whether any particular musical features tend to correlate to a higher popularity score, and also track the changes in musical feature measures over time in relation to peers of the Beatles (i.e., The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, etc.) to reveal how artists of the late 60s often evolved musically in tandem (or slightly earlier or later) with each other.”

What advice would you give to current or incoming NSS Data students?

“This program is as much about learning how to learn as it is learning new skills. While guiding you through the foundational concepts of various tools and languages, instructors will often intentionally refrain from leading you totally out of the woods, and so it will be up to you and your cohort to consult the tooling documentation, trial-and-error your code until something clicks, or just plain Google yourself the rest of the way out. But that's how it's gonna work in the real-world, and that's what makes this program so valuable!”

HIRE PARKER

Now that Parker has graduated from NSS, he’s ready to join a team that will help him continue to grow as a budding data analyst! Connect with Parker on his LinkedIn profile and listen to his podcast below to learn more about his capstone project and time at NSS!