18, self-taught, aiming for my first data analyst role. Built a SQL case study and an ETL pipeline. What would make these actually interview-ready?
I'm 18 and teaching myself data analysis with the goal of landing an entry-level analyst job, ideally in healthcare. Instead of just doing tutorials, I tried to build two projects that mimic real analyst work, and I'd really appreciate honest feedback from people who actually do this for a living.
The first is a SQL case study. I built a realistic clinic-network database (patients, providers, appointments, billing) and wrote 15 business questions against it, working up from basic aggregation to window functions like RANK, NTILE, and running totals. The idea was to answer things a practice would actually care about, like no-show rates by insurance type and which patients drive most of the revenue.
The second is an end-to-end data pipeline using real public health data for Westchester County, NY (from the NY State DOH). It pulls the raw data, cleans it, runs data-quality checks, calculates some statistics and a composite "health index," and outputs an interactive dashboard. The part I'm most proud of is that the logic is direction-aware, so it knows a higher vaccination rate is good but a higher mortality rate is bad, instead of blindly comparing numbers.
A couple of honest notes: the SQL database is synthetic (built to have realistic patterns), while the pipeline uses real published data.
My questions:
- For an entry-level analyst, do these show the right skills, or am I missing something obvious that hiring managers look for?
- Is a composite index a good idea to showcase, or does it look like I'm overcomplicating things?
- What's the single most valuable thing I could build next?
Link to repo in the comments. Thanks for any feedback.