Another blog post about my journey with GSOC. This week I’m implementing some summary statistics for survey data. Surrvey methodology quite resembles ordinary statistical methodology, but there are some pervasive subtleties there due to the importance of the study design for doing standard errors, tests and confidence intervals in a defensible manner. Learning what others have done to make robust analyses with their survey data is quite fun. The hard part is of course the implementation. I haven’t used Python in quite some time and I have very limited experience with it, so things are starting off kind of rough. But I hope the next couple of weeks will go along more smoothly.
I can’t lie, the main difficulty is time management. I thought I could work on this project while reading papers and getting prepared for research this summer and that’s not the case at all. If your mentor thinks it’ll take “x” hours to do something, you can safely add 5-10 hours to their guess. Plus, I had to recognize that I’ll get more done if I work 8 hours throughout the day instead of 6 hours one day and 10 hours another day. You don’t want to stop too quickly or you won’t get into “the run of things” but overworking yourself will lead to sloppy mistakes. Anyway, by my next post I’ll probably be working on some regression methods! Will keep you updated.