Week 4

Well, it literally didn't hit me that today was Thursday until I got an email reminding me to write my weekly update.  I thought, "But it's not Thursday yet!"  and then my watch told me that I was wrong, today actually is Thursday.  So once again, I have no idea where my summer is going...

This week, though, basically just went into the school reports!  I have become a master of Excel bar charts and pie charts.  Along the way, I'm learning SPSS syntax, and with some help from Sam, was able to generate the data for the new groupings that we decided on at a meeting last week.  I also had to figure out the syntax for a few little things that the original output did not include, which made me really happy when I got them to work!  I'm also learning new things about statistics and surveys - like the fact that Likert scales are easy for the people taking the survey to use, but create all kinds of interesting problems on the analysis side!  Once we get the charts that we want nailed down, it will be very easy to replicate for each school.

I also tackled the PEARS open-ended responses (which I had previously categorized in an Excel spreadsheet), and really tried to pick out the main things people were saying.  Within a category (for example, Work Pathways), I pulled out how many people were saying the same type of thing (like "6 people changed jobs because of their families").  Most interesting was people's feedback and suggestions to the schools - there are a few interesting and valid suggestions (among the people complaining, haha).  I made a PowerPoint, and I will be presenting this work at our group meeting next week!

Yep, so I've basically spent all week going between Excel, PowerPoint, and SPSS!

In the realm of fun things, I got to see a good friend of mine from high school whi I hadn't seen in about 7 months earlier this week!  Also, a friend and I finally finished watching the gymnastics Olympic trials, which she had taped - and then I spent some time showing her videos of some of my old teammates and me doing gymnastics, and I was feeling super nostalgic.  Luckily, this weekend, I'm going up to Sacramento to go to the State Fair!  But I'm also going to get to stop by my old gymnastics gym and see my old coaches and hopefully some of my teammates because they are having their annual summer exhibition that day - I'm SUPER excited about that, because I haven't seen them in a very long time!