Building My First dbt Project with DuckDB

Why I’m Learning dbt as an Analyst You can find the project on GitHub here: zhugejun/learn-dbt-by-building I’ve been an Institutional Research Analyst in higher education for almost a decade. For my day-to-day job, I can wrangle enrollment with SQL, automate reports with R, build prediction models with Python, and visualize data with Power BI. There are times that I need to run queries to pull data from CAMS directly, download data from ZogoTech (our third-party OLAP vendor), save it as CSV, and load it to R for aggregation, visualization, and further analysis. Sometimes, I need to ingest the enrollment history data from National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) and combine it with data from multiple resources to create a superintendent report. ...

January 11, 2026 · 9 min · Gejun Zhu