The One Thing I Learned at TripleTen That Made All the Difference: Muriel Palanca’s TripleTen Review

By Muriel Palanca, TripleTen grad

Spoilers for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban below.

I’m a huge Harry Potter fan. Going through a TripleTen bootcamp can feel like a year at Hogwarts in some ways. It’s challenging and surprising, but most of all, it’s a whole lot of fun as well as an adventurous learning experience.

My favorite book in the series is Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It has everything: magic, misdirection, time travel, a heist, an escape, victims becoming villains, unlikely heroes, and a boy coming of age with his best friends.

There’s a dark creature in the book called a dementor. Being around it makes you feel like all the happiness has gone from the world. If a dementor gets close enough to you, it will suck your soul out and you’ll cease to exist. Scary stuff, huh? I liken dementors to a concept that TripleTen refers to as Struggle Mountain.

Struggle Mountain is the part of the program that feels very hard, and there’s no way around it except through. And there’s not just one “Struggle Mountain.” There are multiple, and they vary in size. Some mountains are frustrating, and some feel like they are sucking the soul out of you (that’s what SQL felt like for me).

For Harry, it’s the dementors. He spends all year practicing how to cast a Patronus charm — very advanced magic (kind of like being a wizard at Tableau) that drives the dementors away with the bright energy of happy memories in the shape of an animal. At the start, he isn’t able to produce more than some silver wisps, but it’s enough to buy a few moments to escape in a pinch.

There’s a scene later on where Harry and his friends get surrounded by dementors and Harry isn’t able to keep them at bay. Just when all hope seems lost, a bright light emanates from across the way, casting out the dementors: It’s a Patronus in the shape of a stag, and it looks to Harry like it’s his dead father who casts it… before everything goes dark.

Later in the book, Harry time travels back to the past and is on the other side of this scene. He is hoping to catch a glimpse of his dead father saving him. But no one is coming. The dementors are closing in.

Harry realizes he was the one who cast the spell, and he is the one who must do it now. “Expecto patronum!” he shouts, summoning the stag. He saves his friends. He saves himself.

When asked about it later he says, “I knew I could do it all this time because I'd already done it... does that make sense?”

And that was the realization I had that made all the difference in my TripleTen experience.

I came into the TripleTen Business Intelligence Analytics program pretty clueless. I’d never made a pivot table, didn’t know the difference between left join and other joins, never used Tableau or fiddled in Power BI, and didn’t even know that Excel has filters. I imagine anyone else considering TripleTen wouldn’t know much about the subject matter either, but that they have the desire to learn.

What I personally love about TripleTen is that it made me feel empowered during every sprint. Everything is doable. Why? Because I had done it before.

Simple example:

1. You read the material in the sprint which shows you how to make a pivot table.
2. You follow the step-by-step directions to make a pivot table on a practice sheet.
3. You do a case study where you make a pivot table.
4. You take a mini quiz based on the case study asking you about the various steps involved in making the pivot table. It also asks you something like, “Which day had the highest cash sales?”, and you need to know how to manipulate the pivot table to get the answer, but they tell you how to do that in the material.
5. You finish reading the material of the sprint.
6. Before the project, you do a big quiz that tests you on everything you just learned about pivot tables.
7. You do a big project at the end of the sprint, and part of it is making a pivot table. The numbers and the context may be slightly different, but the process is still the same.

TripleTen teaches you concepts in a way that is repetitive but not boring. It’s like when you learn a dance. Here’s step 1 and 2. Now here’s 3. Let’s do that together 123. Again, 123. Nice! Now here’s 4 and 5. Now 123. Add 4 and 5. Now 12345. Brilliant!

The program gives you little victories along the way so by the time you get to the project at the end of the sprint, you already know how to do it because you’ve done the same thing multiple times before. The knowledge is constantly reinforced and built upon. If you feel like you need more help, there is an endless amount of support in the form of Discord boards, Dot AI assistance, coworking sessions, one-on-one tutoring, and your personal Success Manager.

Just like Harry, you have the power inside you to succeed. Believe you can do it and know that TripleTen will help you get there!