For those of you who haven’t seen
me for quite some time probably wondering how I’m doing, well I’m doing
alright. My hair is shorter than last year, very short as a matter of fact,
well above my shoulder, with a trim on the back, but I don’t cut it too short,
don’t worry.
Talking about work, I’ve been
working as a researcher for the past 4 months in a research institute in
Jakarta. The first two month I was excited about my new job, getting my own
computer and free internet access (although not as fast as it is in NL). My
workload was not too heavy then, I had fun adapting to a new environment; new
friends, and new habits.
It was March when I first had a
hands-on experience with STATA (a statistical software). I was familiar with
SPSS (another statistical software) since my bachelor degree era and forced to
be intensive in it till recently doing my thesis for master degree. These two
software are a bit similar, but I must say STATA has taken me to a whole new
dimension. Very difficult, that’s how your impression will be for the first
time, I got the same impression too. But after a while, I realize that STATA
has taught me something else, PATIENCE. Why, you asked????
STATA runs on commands, so even
if you made tiny mistake, it still won’t work. In my case, lack of a dot or a
comma can ruins a half day work. How come you asked again???? well, running a
large dataset can take a good half day till it’s done, so if you made a mistake
on the last line of the command, it could ruin your whole day. Thus, you cannot
stop and save it, you must wait till it’s finished with the whole command and
produces tables of result. One day, I waited till 6.30 PM for the result,
jeopardizing my train schedule and took the last express train, then finding
out later that it’s useless, the commands I used were still wrong, so I must
fix it and do it all over again.
Not to mention I had to transfer the result to excel
format to make it presentable. Recently, I’m working on a 8-year analysis based
on household surveys, doing it on health indicators only, took me 2 months to
finish. Imagine a whole day looking at a black background of STATA, oh my
God….I do find time checking email or replying them, but not as much as I want
too *sigh*
Another thing, it taught me not
to give up easily; try all kinds of command modification, trial and error,
learn it in the reference book, or never hesitate to ask a colleague if I had
problems. So now that one part of the STATA running project is done, I just
want to take a deep breath and relax…till the next project comes!
