It is great to have you here! Preparing for the MakiPeople assessment with Wise is a fantastic step toward landing that graduate analyst role, and we will make sure you feel completely ready for it.

Before we map out our study plan and dive into the material, I would love to hear a bit about your current background so we can tailor this to your exact needs.

To make sure we spend our time on the things that will help you most before Friday, I'd love to hear how you feel about the three core topics.

How would you rate your current comfort level with SQL, numerical reasoning, and data visualization?

Starting completely from scratch for all three areas is the perfect way to build rock-solid foundations before your Friday deadline. Because you have just a few days, we will focus on highly targeted, high-yield topics specifically optimized for the MakiPeople assessment environment.

Your Strategic Study Plan

To make sure you are 100% prepared by Friday at 6pm, we will tackle one core competency at a time, building up from basic concepts to exam-style scenarios.

Here is how we will structure our sprints over the next few days to get you fully ready:

Let's kick things off with Sprint 1: SQL Fundamentals. In a graduate screening, SQL questions test your ability to pull the exact data a business needs. It's like querying a digital filing cabinet.

To start, we need to understand the basic blueprint of a SQL query. Every data pull begins with the SELECT and FROM clauses, which tell the database exactly what columns you want and where they live.

The Core Database Blueprint: SELECT and FROM

To pull any data from a database, you must tell SQL two basic things: what you want to find, and where it is stored.

We do this using a block of code called a query, which relies on two fundamental building blocks:

• SELECT: This tells the database which columns of data you want to retrieve.
• FROM: This tells the database which specific table those columns live in.

Think of a database as a digital warehouse. The table is a specific filing cabinet, and the columns are the labeled folders inside it. By combining SELECT and FROM, you are telling the database exactly which folders to pull out of which cabinet.

Let's look at a concrete example. Imagine Wise has a database table named transactions that stores details about customer transfers. The table has three columns: transaction_id, amount, and currency.

If we want to view a list of every transaction amount and its currency, we write this simple query:

SELECT amount, currency
FROM transactions;

Notice how we separate multiple columns with a comma, but we do not put a comma after the final column before the FROM clause. Also, ending your query with a semicolon is a standard practice that tells the database engine, "I am done writing my command!"

If we wanted to pull absolutely every column from that table without typing all their names out, we can use an asterisk * as a wildcard shortcut. Using SELECT * tells SQL to grab every single column available in that table.