My New Year’s resolution… a year late
By Lindsay Lamb
About a year ago, Andrea and I met to plan out the best year ever! We went through our goals as a business, our goals working with clients, our professional goals and our personal goals. It was a really fun process to talk about where we were, both personally and professionally, and where we wanted to go both in our business and in our personal lives. We were ambitious, but we had each other for support and accountability.
And then the pandemic happened.
Although it wasn’t one of our goals, Andrea and I adapted. We spent nearly a year working apart. Checking in over zoom, a quick phone call, and sometimes when the stars aligned even a walk. We used Trello to keep all of our projects and activities on track, we were making it work (all while juggling watching kids, zoom kindergarten, and our spouse’s work schedule). Had someone come along during our year-in-review planning meeting and told us about the pandemic and how we would have to shift our work and personal lives, I probably would have said, “You are crazy. There is no way I can do all of that.” And yet, here we are, nearly one year later.
Andrea and I embraced our company name – Agile Analytics – and truly became agile. We met with clients virtually, used innovative tools like Miro to make planning meetings more intimate and engaging, sought out new clients and opportunities that didn’t seem possible a year ago, we thought of new resources our clients and colleagues in the field might benefit from having and started creating those. I started writing a blog!
While all of these activities are great, they were not my personal or professional goals for 2020.
My big goal? Learning R.
Learning R has been a personal and professional goal for a while now and I always end up getting out of it. I spent about 10 years using SAS and nearly 20 years using SPSS. In many ways, learning R was more like learning a new language. I didn’t need to learn R since I could use SAS, SPSS, and Excel for many things, but I wanted to learn R. I decided 2020 would be different. Andrea, an R guru, was teaching an R course to one of our clients and asked me to join. I jumped at the opportunity. We had our first class the week before everything shut down las Spring. I figured that was it for me and R… but we persisted and continued having classes throughout the Spring and Summer, virtually of course.
During this time, Andrea sent me bite-sized projects and I challenged myself to recreate projects Andrea worked on to make sure I understood what she did and to see if I could make them work on my end.
Without even recognizing it happening, I spent the past week uploading, cleaning, and merging data for one of our clients. I ran simple statistics and created tables, saved out subsets of data for Andrea to review. I was doing it! Sure, I have a LONG way to go, but I am no longer scared of using R. I can read the code and understand what is going on behind the scenes. I actually enjoy writing code and using online resources to figure out how to solve problems.
So here I am about a year later, and I feel like I am a totally different person (in more ways than one) than I was a year ago. I have adapted in ways I never thought possible, and I still found opportunities to push myself personally and professionally. Learning R was just one little piece of that, but it was something from my pre-pandemic life that I wanted to accomplish, and honestly helped make me feel a little normal. It gave me something outside of all this madness on which to focus. I made it past that first psychological hurdle in learning R – in the midst of a pandemic, no less – and I feel sure that you can learn R too!