Sunday, June 7, 2020
By:
My first warning sign was in the first sentence of the instructions: “This is something that should be avoided at all costs due to the amount of time it requires.” The steps were pretty simple, click about 20 buttons to specify the degree level and majors that apply to STEM, then choose the variable you want those stats for: repeat for 30 variables, which is then done for the three degree levels (bachelor’s, master’s, PhD). This adds up to a lot of scrolling and button clicking, but it was simple enough that I assumed it would take me one morning, maybe one day if it was especially bad. Regardless, I had mostly finished my job for the week, and this extra little task was something I thought would be helpful for anyone trying to do my job in the future, so I forged ahead.
This was denial: the first in the five stages of grief. I timed myself going through it perfectly once, and it only took 2 minutes, so I thought I could tidily have it done in about two hours, three if I was feeling fatigued.
Then came anger. Why was this website set up this way? Why couldn't I select all of my variables at once and then click a couple of checkboxes to make new variables instead of searching and scrolling and clicking the same buttons over and over? The first time I lost all of my data because the website spontaneously refreshed itself I was two variables in; the second time, I was about 20 variables in. I figured out how to intermittently save progress after that.
Depression came midway through day-two: as I clicked and scrolled and clicked and clicked I grew more fatigued. There were cats walking across my laptop, I had to eat and sleep, I had meetings for christ's sake. I was about half way through.
I'll be honest, I wasted some time with the bargaining. As I clicked button after button, I thought about the ways I could work around this clicking. Maybe I could do the process for one variable, copy-paste thirty times, and just replace some words in parts of the code? Maybe I could just do one degree level and duplicate that and change one thing to fix it and eliminate 60% of the work? But as I scrolled through other files and dug into the code I found that workarounds were impossible where they would have been helpful. In hindsight I'm glad I spent the time to find out how the code functions, but in the moment it was devastating.
Finally, acceptance. I resigned myself to my fate and clicked, taking breaks and drinking water when needed. I pulled up Netflix and played a show in the background so my brain could have something slightly less monotonous to pay attention to. My mind drifted to pondering my place in the world— in physics. Someone had to click those buttons. Even if I suffered, it was so that nobody else would ever have to be slightly inconvenienced to update a handful of APS graphs in the future, and that's something I'm happy to have done. I finally finished around 11:00AM on Friday. I was older, wiser.
My mentor and I met that morning and talked about this experience, and how difficult it was for both of us to navigate some of the documentation for my summer job the first time through. My whole summer is dedicated to updating a series of graphs, lists, and statistics for the American Physical Society, all of which are very important for researchers and physicists to do their work. While I'm happy to do this work, it's frustrating how much learning how to do my job is slowing me down. Hopefully next week I will get into the swing of it a little more, and I will never take it for granted again if my first week's task is to "learn how to download data".
Madison Swirtz