What a ride?! I can’t believe the first semester is over. Five more to go. I heard that the first one is the toughest and takes the most time. We’ll see.

I have learned so much. I don’t know how to describe how awesome this was. I think it was awesome because of my own personal growth. In ways I am proud of myself for taking on such a hard adventure at my age….I still have more than a few cobwebs to dust off, but I actually made it through the first semester. What I can describe is how disappointed I am with myself in certain areas where improvement is definitely needed.

I have to figure out how to balance life with school. I spent too many hours sitting at this desk. I went though a time around week 12, 13, & 14, where I was burnt out. The pandemic virus situation we are living through, didn’t help, but that’s because I was slow to adapt. I ended up siting in this chair at this desk for 12 to 16 hours per day.

I worked at this desk.

I paid bills at this desk.

I went to school at this desk.

I went to church at this desk.

I’m really tired of this desk.

I have to get out and exercise, work in the yard, go fishing…I don’t know, but I have to get away from this desk more often. This was completely my fault and I can see it now. Where was Logistic Regression on that one?

Like I said, I have learned a ton about R, SAS, stats, regression, and most importantly myself.

Thanks for an amazing first semester!

I have been thinking about this journey. I started this semester thinking this was going to be a fun refresher for me. I have to admit that I didn’t know anything about Logistic Regression before a couple of weeks ago. I had never even considered how to predict a yes/no, on/off, 1/0….. actually never even thought about needing to. I have seen the light!

I am amazed at how powerful it is to be able to predict and then understand the variables that were important in said prediction. This is really how business strategies are made or should be made. Think about it….take a business problem, predict why it is a problem, understand what is driving the problem (root cause) and solve the root cause. Or, take a business solution, predict why it is a solution, understand what is driving the solution, and exploit it.

I think I’m ready to be a consultant!

The heat is on! Wow! things are piling up. Final projects are being assigned and we are two weeks from the end of the first semester. Time to hunker down and get it done!

This weeks lesson was on Text Analysis. It is amazing what you can do with random sets of texts. I was blown away with how powerful this was. How you can measure the sentiment of a word and them decipher if the text was positive or negative.

I always thought word clouds were magical. Now, I know they are. R just does it for you. Again you have to scrub, transform, clean and pic through the data and then re-clean it some more and continue to scrub it and then it becomes magical. I had never even thought of doing this type of analysis on text. It is exciting and I hope to really be able to learn this and be able to add this skill to the arsenal. I am completely blown away. Great Stuff!

The end is in sight. Dang, there is still a lot of work to do. I finally got caught up…somewhat. I took a couple of days off from work, and buckled down.

I really, really liked function building in R. I found myself wasting time playing with the mechanism, to see if I could figure out how to do different things. It was FUN! I am going to continue to use R and make it a “go to” tool to use. I have been talking it up at work and several people want me to send them links to online references and training sites that we’ve been shown.

I think I can become good at this. I’m definitely not there yet! But I really enjoy it and appreciate what it can do.

R is making more sense and getting easier, or I should probably say more familiar. I have learned to code the simple straightforward tasks without help or having to copy and paste. SAS was much harder for me. Maybe it’s just that I learned so much in the SAS section that it was easier to transition to R. Either way I feel much more confident in R.

This week we were focused on Regression Analysis. I am amazed at how easy running the model is. Both SAS and R are capable of running the actual model with just a few lines of code. However you may have hundreds of lines of code to load, scrub, transform and stage the data the right way. That is definitely the hard part. I can think of about a thousand different analogies that fit this process. When everything is clean and correct, the regression model is very simple.

The lesson here is…..DATA IS RARELY CLEAN!

Sometimes I crack myself up. Week 10 – R….I thought that was funny. I have really enjoyed learning to program in R. I am still impressed at how intuitive it can be, and at the same time get so frustrated with nuances. The case sensitivity is probably what catches me the most. It’s pretty easy when you keep everything lower case. However, there are commands and functions that mix the case, such as “as.Date” messes with me every time.

I feel the thought process for programming in R is similar to using excel. It seems very straight forward and logical to me ….most of the time. In excel you transform the data, format it, build some calculations, filter, create a graph, or some output it’s straightforward. R is a lot like writing a macro in excel but a ton easier. VBA sucks!

I think for the most part it’s fairly easy to figure things out and work around obstacles in R. There are many ways to do everything, I’m just not efficient at any one way. I can’t wait to become more proficient. I really enjoy this!

Don’t ever get behind! I have forgotten the stress created when you get behind in a class. It’s similar to being behind at work, but not quite. At work, I can literally go off site for a day or two, during business hours, and burn through whatever work I have. Yes, you get an unhealthy dose of cortisol, but you can carve out time to get it done. I can also, go to my boss and tell him what I’m doing and he actually appreciates my prioritization skills and work ethic.

Getting behind at school, creates a completely different experience. It’s really like missing the bus, you get left behind. Now that’s not to say that the driver/professor won’t come back and get you, they will, however it takes more effort for everyone, and creates an epic, dump-truck load of cortisol. Stress is real. The other surprising thing about this anomaly is that I put much more mental and emotional energy on school than I do work. I rarely stop thinking about it. I love it. It is absolutely the fun part of my daily life. I love applying what I learn at work. That’s the sweet spot.

This Coronavirus thing has thrown a real wrench in life. I have to buckle down and get caught up. The sad part is that I am really enjoying learning how to program in R and by rushing to catch up I am cutting myself short. I guess I have to do what needs to be done.

It’s been a while since i last posted. Spring break wasn’t much of a break. I am still having a great time in school. I can’t even describe how much I’ve learned even though my brain still feels like old rusty gears grinding together. I am now insanely jealous of those students that make it look easy.

These last few weeks we have been working on our mid-term project in SAS. We were basically turned loose, or at least given a longer leash, to go and build some prediction models. My models were average at best, but I now know how to do it…..and it really wasn’t hat difficult. The one thing that has hit home over the last few weeks is that common sense still has a place in grad school. I caught myself several times overthinking things and adding tons of stress to my homework assignments and projects. Slow down and think through it….Works every time!

I can’t believe how fast this is going. I feel smarter…it really doesn’t matter if I actually am smarter or not, because I feel smarter.

We are finally getting to a point where we actually have new, very real, usable, marketable, skills that we didn’t have when we started. It is extremely rewarding to me. I have been able to apply some learnings to my job. I have had better ideas, because these classes have made me think differently or exposed me to different ways of thinking.

I am curious, about what would have happened if I had done this 15 or 20 years ago. Would it have been such an impact? I don’t know. I once had a boss that told me that “technology is changing so fast that a technology degree was only worth about 2 years, you have to continually be leaning new stuff.” I think that’s why I love math and analytics, you can really build on everything you learn and know.

This is so dang fun!

For the first time since this trek started, I almost feel caught up. I really enjoyed this week learning the basics of t-tests and regression analysis. I vaguely remember doing this work in my undergrad work, but I completely missed the understanding of how many ways I can actually use this stuff. It is kind of a sick fun right now. I realize how much better of an employee I could have been had I really learned these things way back when. I am very much looking forward to what the next two years holds. It can’t come fast enough.

I have to admit though, the work has been challenging. I need to start making a habit of watching the videos twice, especially the class lectures. I really got hung up on how to start, but it was a snap once I watched the videos again. I don’t know, maybe it is just the stress of trying to figure it out and then watching the lectures….either way once isn’t enough for this old dog.