Working

Well, slap me thrice and hand me to my mama -- the 'new post' thing works at work but not at home! Very surprising because things are usually the other way round - we run two Asus EEEPC (with the hashed together linux distro they use -- don't get Dave started on it, but I find it okay) and an old HP laptop with Windows Vista at home, and I'm running a Mac OS X iMac at work here, so when things don't work, it's usually a Mac-PC thing and the Mac usually loses out. But, go MAC! The applet that makes new posts for the blog works here :)

So, today I'm at work. I don't want to include much identifying information about my job, but I think it's sufficient to say I'm at data analyst at a research institute in Perth. I've only had the one job after doing my honours here, and always had the same supervisor, Helen. She's been a great mentor to me and this is a very flexible workplace, but my job is pretty demanding in terms of time and brain power. In the past I've found it to be a major contributor to the stress in my life, particularly as I deal with data that pertains to children with disabilities, which also ties in to some of the 'hot buttons' from my pasts. On the one hand, it's great to be able to bring my at home experiences as a teenager/young adult to fore to help me and my team get a handle on the data we want to analyse, and give a different perspective in this often 'research & researcher' focused world, but on the other, in difficult times, it can be hard to have the same things pop up again and again, both at work and at home. For that reason,  I don't read the emails from the families (other team members do) and spend more of my time looking at the data as just that, data, to some extent pushing the fact it's information about specific families and how they cope with some times truly horrendous difficulties to the back burner. I have to get through the day somehow, and I feel it's less bad that I'm consciously choosing to do that, knowing full well how things can be, than if I never had the 'fear' or whatever in the first place. If I was just a numbers girl, and never had thought or felt about what's going on for the people filling in the questionnaires, that would be worse. Instead, I'm choosing to leave those perspectives for other times and other places, and keep that I want to be the most effective and accurate data analyst possible to honour their contribution to our projects in the front of my mind at work.

This has changed in the last year anyway, since I've taken on a somewhat different role, in that now, I'm working on what we call 'the program grant' which, instead of being chiefly to do with the surveys, it to do with the population data from the whole of WA. That's right -- if you were born here or if you've ever been to hospital here, I've got your data somewhere. I can't find it though, it's too big to look for any one person, and I don't have specific birthdates. This data is somewhat easier to deal with from a 'personal' perspective, but it's also harder to use, causes more computer problems, and has required me to learn lots of new techniques in my statistical software to cope with the large numbers of records. Besides that, my project for this data is 'killing two birds with one stone' in that I'm doing it for money (as a work KPI) and for credit (as a uni project) so it has a tighter deadline than usual (JUNE!) and more reporting requirements (PARAGRAPHS!). That adds a bit of extra pressure to spice things up a bit, which has good and bad sides, of course. Again with the balance thing. I was working fairly well to the deadlines I set myself to make sure I had time to write it all up when I discovered, that through a computer f*ckup, everything I'd done since Nov 23 last year (that was March 23) was wrong. Completely wrong. Re-read the original data in and start from 'scratch' wrong. Yay! /sarcasm. That has streamlined my project somewhat, and some time between March 23 and Easter, I finally hit on the right process to get the data how I need it to get the project done, so now I'm moving along on it again, though, as always, the writing's harder than the analysis.

As though I didn't quite have enough going on at work, I'm also studying for a masters degree in biostatistics. At the moment it's one coursework unit and the project I talked about above. Today I'm trying to do an assessed exercise for the unit on my laptop while also working on the project on the Mac. Of course, right now I'm not actually doing either, but that's the plan. I was thinking of trying to do the assessed exercise last night (it was due midnight, after all) but I quickly realised that the RAGE! I get when my coursework notes don't 'make sense' in my opinion would lead to severe issues and possibly destruction of property if I tried to do it last night, without anyone around to help me, and after a fairly frustrating day of lack of "productivity".  So it's on the list for today, with the plan of it being handed in today, regardless of standard. This is a very new thing for me, the idea I might hand in an assessment late or incomplete, but I'm coping with it -- in fact, the decision that I can do things that way, that, to prevent damage to my mental and physical health, I may have to do it that way, has been pretty powerful. Yes, it's important to get "good marks". Yes, my mum or dad might comment on my marks not being high enough (always prefacing or suffixing with 'only joking' of course). But overall, what I want out of the course is to learn how to do the techniques, and to graduate with my masters of biostatistics. I can do that with 60% just as much as I can with 90%. And if my health goes better with 60%, then it's worth it to me. If I drive myself into the ground trying to get 90% and then can't finish the course, well, I haven't got what I wanted, which is to graduate. So I'm trading off. And glad to be doing so. Because it works for me.