~light of the world~

Monday, August 31, 2009

My gosh, I'm not sure I've ever had a job that felt like it just dragged on forever.

Data coding was my job for one of the projects done by CRPP in NIE, and it was essentially to assign codes to the answers given by the survey-takers in an Excel file.

Now, there were 13509 survey takers, and 4 responses each, though not all of them filled in all the entries, so there were blank cells here and there.

So thankfully, instead of 13509 x 4 = 54036 entries, it was only about 46400 entries. And also, there were already pre-assigned codes, so it wasn't as if I had to come up with a whole set of codes by myself.

It was really easy at first, because being an excel file, I could arrange the column in alphabetical order, which would put all similarly spelt answers together, and then just put the correct code in the next column, click and drag until wherever necessary.

Unfortunately as it went on, I had to try to figure out typo errors as well as make decisions on creating new codes, or conforming to older ones.

I kept doing it, until the point where I thought I was going to go crazy because after entering the codes so many times after a while you it kind of just sticks in your brain.

And FINALLY, as of 11:15am this morning on the 31st of August, I finished the last entry, completing my job!

The good thing was that I got to work from home, so I didn't need to go to NIE like every working day. I think my general knowledge has increased as well.

Now I'm going to have lunch with Jane and Adeline (old MGS friends!!), and they just missed the Teachers' Day celebrations at MGS. I THOUGHT SO, they wanted to be there at what, 11:30, but my younger sister came home at about 11 already, so they must have been late!

EDIT: We had lunch at the Soup Spoon, a first time for me. And it's really filling, until I couldn't finish the bread bowl. It was really nice to see them again, but they're both flying off this month to the UK for university studies! I actually didn't know that Addie had been studying there for about 2 years already! She talks a little like a Brit now, how cool! And Jane's gonna do medicine (in Scotland), like me!! Yay!

Labels: family, friends, MGS, work

xuan blogged at 11:32 AM

May your light shine...
in the darkness...