The Art of Patience

In just my first week of working I've already had to exercise an immense amount of patience.

To provide context for those exploring the site, my name is Glorielly Gonzalez. Over the summer of 2021, I am working with Deanna on a project involving the data collected by the air quality sensors placed around campus to monitor the COVID-19 pandemic. Basically my job is to analyze the data for trends and make pretty graphs that explain those trends to others.

To achieve this goal, I spend most of my days coding in R. When I get stuck I learn more R code on DataCamp (a paid platform where students learn code useful for data analytics) and scouring the web for helpful code. In doing this, I become frustrated daily. I become frustrated when I cannot get my code to run, or when my code runs, but does not give me my desired result. I want it to work within the first few trials not with the next couple of days...

That leads me to my topic of discussion The Art of Patience. I'm sure there is some book out there that tries to explain this, but I'm only documenting my personal experience thus far. I have found that a little patience goes a long way in solving problems and getting result. This week I wanted to churn out several graphs and results for Deanna in just a couple of days. I set a little too of an high expectation for myself under the assumption that my pervious two years of coding experience was sufficient. However, I was dead wrong about that. There have been a lot of road blocks and the process of finding solutions is sloooow. It took me a couple days just to make this graph.

This graph looks pretty busy, so it's not the best to illustrate my point, but I'll just say this. To make a graph like this, it only takes about an hour when you're given beautiful classroom data. I didn't anticipate all the time and work that would go into making the data manageable and the trouble that the timestamp variable that is on the x-axis about would give me. However, I managed to get it done. How? By mustering a little more patience. In order to make this plot, I spent hours learning how to work with time data, I played around a bit with code (sometimes trial and error is the best way to get to the result), I took much need breaks to freshen my mind, and most importantly, I did not give up. I knew that making this graph was possible so I continued on.

As a last point, I want to give a shout out to Deanna. She is a wonderful person and advisor. She's trying to help you succeed. I wouldn't have been able to conceive the plot of above without her help and guidance.

So that was a little inside scoop of my first week of research. I can't wait to see what else is in store!

- Glorielly