I interned at SAMSI, a statistical analysis research lab, studying how human mortality is affected by air pollution and heat. I learned how to code a little bit in R:, well, I learned how to copy someone else’s code and get what I want from different data sets. I also learned how to do a number of things in excel that showed me statistical significance of a data set, and allowed me to pick and choose what data I was focusing on. Most importantly, however, I learned that the work force is made up of tasks that you are expected to complete, and trial and error actions that lead you to that completion. Once you have experienced the trial and error, you can begin to learn the most efficient ways to do a specific task, but it is really in trial and error that innovation can occur and ideas can be refined. Additionally, you being to seek out resources and tools that will help you make the process more efficient, rather than become bored by the strategies used to solve a problem because you haven’t spent time frustrated by the fact that you can’t do it or can’t do it very quickly and easily.
I would very much like to create similar experiences for my students, so that they can begin to understand the frustration and satisfaction that true learning regularly causes. I believe that this will benefit them much more going out into the working world than learning all of the skills, knowledge, and processes that they will inevitably learn along the way as they trudge through the task and try to make the cumbersome trial and error processes more efficient and less time consuming.
The biggest challenge was working through the boredom that came in the middle of the day after hours of working on the same thing by myself in a cubicle. That taught me that I really don’t want to go into industry myself, since I get a thrill from working with people and always having something new to figure out. It also taught me that I need to figure out how to teach my kids to endure through a task, even when they become bored and uninterested in it (i.e. build a sense of sustained inquiry in them).
The most interesting moment was when I entered a line of code into R:, it came back as an error, and I figured out how to fix the error all on my own to get exactly what I wanted from the code. I also got a thrill from accidentally finding a tool in excel (through an online article that was explaining something else to me), and using it to create multiple datasets very quickly (after having spent the day before taking hours to create one data set). Then, I was able to teach my mentor about that tool, since he had never used it before, and I felt like I was benefitting him as well.
I look forward to using the data set and the lessons that I learned in my internship to better my students and make my course more interesting for myself and my students. I am thankful for the experience, even the frustrating and boring moments, for they made me stronger and ignited in me a passion for figuring out how to help my students overcome those obstacles and endure through those obstacles.