shout out to my brass rat


My brass rat got me through this assignment. I spent a good chunk of this unit fairly confused, typing code aimlessly into R and praying that I get a result that makes some amount of sense. I started actively working on the research article about two weeks before it was due. But with 5 days left, I still felt like I was not in a good place and barely had a story. I also was feeling pretty unconfident and unable, as this unit was pretty confusing, and I honestly did not follow what was going on in lecture or why we were doing so much R analysis in lab. AND THEN I GOT MY BRASS RAT. And she is so beautiful. The next day, when I was still doing my R coding and trying to find a story, I would look down at my hands, typing as fast as they could, and was reminded that I can, in fact, do this. My attitude towards the assignment shifted from “ugh, I can’t do this and I hate it” to “wow this is actually really interesting and I am an engineer”. By the time I finished on Saturday at 9:50PM, I was really proud of the work that I put in and the final result. And also, how nice my brass rat looked when I pressed submit on Stellar.

 All this to say, the research article was for sure really challenging and not very straight forward. I think the biggest key for me was finding the confidence in myself that I could get it done as well as finding something interesting in the data that actually compelled me to keep coding so that I could write a complete and interesting story. I also let my boyfriend read over my paper before I turned it in, to make sure there were no typos or logical jumps that I missed, and he noticed that halfway through my paper I switched to size 11 font which made my page count funky – so I also recommend letting someone else read over your article.

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