Head Start

This morning I got a jump on my future job as a research methods lab instructor - a guy in the library computer lab asked the lab student-worker if she knew SPSS and she said, sorry no clue. He said, that's okay, I'm just totally confused by this assignment. I offered to help him, and 30 minutes later, he had finished his assignment (which appeared to be for a macro econ course since the rows of data were economic and demographic indicators for various countries). I did occasionally have a crisis of "oh man, how does a person do this from the menu toolbar?" since I do most of my work in syntax. But we got it done, and I felt glad to have helped the guy out.

I was similarly utterly confused when I had to do my first assignment using R (an open source statistical programming language) and had nothing but an online manual and some example code from my professor to go on. Fortunately, after I figured out a couple of key points (write the commands in an editor, then paste it in; oops, don't modify the professor's code in Word because all the auto-correct things in that program make it a non-usable code editor - like the tendency to make a minus sign into a longer dash*) and Robert interpreted a bit of stat-speak into actual English, I was able to do it pretty easily.

*Note: the professor made this same mistake himself and it took him and one of my class-buddies even longer to figure it out during office hours than it took me at home, so I didn't feel quite so stupid.

Today I also had to hugely disappoint the marketing professor I am working for this semester when she asked me if I could continue working with her over the summer and next fall. This led the research group of three professors to talk about finding a replacement for me. "Perhaps we can find a clone?" one said. Another said, "There's no chance of that, but I hope we can find somebody who is basically competent." I hope they do actually find a replacement (unlike the "real" job I had before this one).

I'm almost done with my lit review for our project, and am now having that sort of crazy, sort of dripping-with-power feeling of being extremely knowledgeable about a narrow line of research. I'm quite excited that I am going to start doing the hypothesis testing analysis next, probably starting by next week. It's been too long since I've worked with analysis of variance techniques, and I'm looking forward to getting back to my analytical roots with this after living in the land of the regression analysis for so long. (OK, there will be regression also, but that's sort of inescapable when there's survey data involved.) Overall, I'm enjoying working on this project a lot and am feeling good about the quality of work I'm doing. I could really see myself doing this for a living, you know?