It is a beautiful summer day and I feel fantastic!! I have just completed a very solid deck for my colloquium next week and will depart shortly to enjoy the rest of the long weekend. It will be really nice to enjoy a full two days off from work AND research.
I have had a very productive week and am feeling proud of my progress. I completed my data clean up, and began some rudimentary analysis in SPSS. It is very satisfying to see how quickly you can analyze data once it is in SPSS. Of course, my challenge quickly became determining how to interpret the results!! Fortunately, I had my first meeting with my tutor which was useful. It turned out that I have remembered more than I thought but it was really beneficial to get input on my progress and answers to questions. I have also enrolled in a SPSS workshop which entails two 3 hour sessions. I think the timing will be good because I have a much better overarching sense of how SPSS works now and also clarity on the types of analysis that I would like to perform.
One thing that struck me with the tutor was that when she was stuck on a question she said, “I will Google it”. This happened perhaps only twice, but it was noteworthy to me. Perhaps what was even more interesting was that within 15 minutes of our meeting she sent me an email with the correct answers. I regularly use Google for a lot of things but my “go to” response for academic questions, beyond searching for research papers, is typically to pull out my textbooks or notes. Think this is a good example of my tendency towards “Old School” thinking/approaches. Today, I tried her approach and was amazed by how effective it was.
Anyway, I am going to head out shortly. I am having dinner with a girlfriend and then going out for drinks and dancing with my partner. Let the fun and frolic begin!!