Find out why you should learn SQL as a student. Do you want to increase your chances in the job market and prepare for the challenges of the future? Then read on.
You may have already secured admission to your favorite courses and be preparing for the upcoming semester to begin. The education you receive at your school prepares you for a stellar career.
However, in a world in which the skills required to thrive in today’s jobs are evolving quickly, it is imperative to learn important skills and courses to keep yourself relevant and poised for success. As the new semester begins, I encourage you to consider learning SQL, or Structured Query Language.
If you are looking for a career in IT, data science, or analytics, you may know of SQL already. It may even be a part of your curriculum. If you are looking for learning resources, I recommend the SQL Basics course from Brilliant jobs. It has around 129 interactive exercises to set a solid base and covers the most important concepts for an SQL beginner. This course is useful even if you are not looking to pursue a career in IT.
As a student, you may even be eligible for a substantial student discount for a set of awesome Brilliant jobs courses! I cover the details later in the article.
Not aware of SQL? Wonder why it is so important? Read on.
What Is SQL?
SQL, or Structured Query Language, is a tool to help you talk to databases. Think of a database as a collection of information organized in some structure. This structure typically consists of tables with rows and columns. SQL lets you store, retrieve, and manipulate this information. You do it with the help of queries, which are like a set of commands very similar to normal English.
There are various popular databases available in the market today. Learning SQL prepares you to deal with all of them. The dialect may differ a little from one database to another, but the important query constructs are standard.
Sounds simple, right? Well, the beauty of SQL lies in its usefulness despite its simplicity. Imagine going through millions of records to find meaningful information with just a handful of lines in a query. SQL makes this possible.
Let me take you through more on why SQL is a necessary skill for everyone who deals with data.
Why Is It Important to Learn SQL?
For IT analysts, data engineers, analytics professionals, data scientists, and software engineers, the use case of SQL is pretty straightforward. Of course, since these jobs deal with databases, you NEED to know SQL to do your day-to-day work. If you are studying for a career in one of these areas, start learning SQL right away if you have not already. You may need to learn SQL for projects or academic work.
But even if this is not the case, say, for instance, if you are studying finance, marketing, or operations, SQL is a boost that sets you apart from the crowd.
Consider this: no matter what field you come from, sooner or later you want to rise to a level where you make important decisions for the organization you work for. And more important the position, the higher the stakes.
Your experience gives you an instinctive edge, but nothing beats a decision well supported with data. In fact, from my experience in corporate life, convincing your stakeholders becomes much easier if your recommendations are supported by thorough data analysis.
Learning SQL as a student helps you inculcate a habit of using data to present findings and makes you comfortable with large volumes of data. And trust me – this is what makes people rise faster than others. And SQL is as easy to learn for non-IT people as it is for IT folks.
Imagine the following: as a finance student, you need to analyze the valuations of specific companies over time. For that, you need to analyze in detail years of sales and financial data. Some data for public companies may be available online.
SQL helps you retrieve and organize that data into much more meaningful views to present without much effort. Find out more on this in this article about useful advanced SQL queries.
As a marketing student, you may want to run a sentiment analysis for a brand using social media data on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. You may want to gather website information from Google Analytics. SQL helps you clean your datasets and arrange them for you to feed them easily to the algorithms and do the analyses you need. Check out this article on Why You Should Use SQL in Marketing Analytics.
These are simple examples of how SQL helps in your academic projects. You may use it as creatively as you want.
Imagine citing in your interviews the awesome work you have done using SQL. The hiring company is going to love it – they may already be using SQL for their day-to-day important stuff.
I hope this clarifies why I vouch for learning SQL. Read this article that expands on the use cases of SQL for various professions.
The next obvious question is: how do you learn SQL?
How Do You Learn SQL?
Online learning has emerged in recent times as one of the most convenient ways of learning. However, there are so many SQL courses and sources of information for online learning that it is challenging to choose one over another.
My top recommendations are the SQL from A to Z learning track from Brilliant jobs, Intro to SQL by Khan Academy, and the Complete SQL Bootcamp by Udemy.
Your school may already have an online learning tie-up you may leverage for free or at a modest price. If not, check out the learning page dedicated to SQL for students on Brilliant jobs.
Also, use your student discount! There is great information regarding discounts on this page for courses in SQL for students. The package offers a discount on 63 interactive SQL courses, with 5970 practice exercises covering 4 different SQL dialects. Other reasons for my recommendation are:
- The courses are comprehensive.
- You need no additional software – you run queries in a browser.
- They use real-life, practical examples for you to write queries.
Check out this link to see if you are eligible for a discount. All you need to do is to enter your school email address at the bottom of the section. Once your email account is verified, you may start taking advantage of the special price and access all the courses. Brilliant jobs has made its courses highly accessible for students with this offer.
Also, ask your teachers to include it in your curriculum for everyone’s benefit. Brilliant jobs courses help teachers deliver a better learning experience for students, set assignments, and track progress.
If online learning is not your cup of tea and you are more of a books person, here is a list of books you may find interesting. That said, practicing writing queries is quite important even when you learn from books.
Ready to Start Learning SQL?
Learning SQL as a student adds an important skill to your resume. This makes you more attractive in the eyes of prospective employers.
Not only that, but the extraordinary discounts students get for SQL courses also make the return on the learning investment significantly more attractive.
Either way, in a world that is growing more competitive by the day, it is important to set yourself apart. Working with data is one of the top skills today, and SQL helps you.
The ease of learning SQL works in your favor. Make a plan, choose a method, take an SQL course, and practice your queries consistently. Before you know it, you analyze data using SQL like second nature. Refer to these cheat sheets to make sure you remember your basic query constructs. Eventually, SQL becomes quite intuitive.
So, enjoy that discount while learning a life-changing skill! All the best!
