I am not a programmer!

On Monday, I went with Ashaki to the Alexandria train station to see her off, and then headed in for an afternoon at work.

Other than Ashaki’s departure, I had a relatively uneventful week. I started on a new task at work… The big project I’m working on has a gigantic dataset of student grades, that they are going to use to look at grade changes during parent deployment cycles. I don’t really have anything to do with that part of the project, but my supervisor asked if I could help out, and of course I said “Of Course!” Basically, I have to take about 80 different datasets and fix them so they can be put into one massive set of data. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big problem for me – time consuming, yes, but we learn how to do this kind of thing in my stats classes, so it is totally do-able. Unfortunately for me, we learned how to do it in one statistical program (SPSS) and the data we have for this project is in a different program (SAS). Although there are ways to take the data from one program and put it into another program, I would have to change it back to the original program before handing it off, and if I ran into any problems, there wouldn’t be anyone to help me (or finish the work).

So, I’ve been spending a lot of time learning how to use SAS. And learning how to write program code. BLECH! Thankfully, the programmer who is helping me has been really great. She is in Santa Monica, though, so sometimes it is hard to coordinate our time zones. I was on the phone with her the other day, and in the middle of our conversation she says, “Um, I think we’re having an earthquake.” I laughed and told her to call me back – the joys of California!

Anyways, the SAS programming definitely has me pulling my hair out some days. It’s especially tough because if I write some code and it is wrong, I don’t know how to fix it myself – I have to call the programmer for help. :( Fortunately, I love the rest of the job, so I am trying to focus on that.