Today, my day did not start until 9. I was very grateful for this because it gave me a chance to sleep in a little. After my leisurely commute, since I missed the traffic, I arrived at Bavarian Nordic and found Erika and Kaitlin in the conference room. To my sheer sadness, Erika told us we would be learning to program in SAS today. Programming was definitely not one of my best subjects last year so the thought of spending all of today learning to do it in a new language was terrifying. I thought I had escaped it, but I was wrong.
Erika set us up with our laptops and an extra one with the correct software (since we were having technical difficulties). She also explained to us that we would be using SAS to manipulate data. Erika does this very often for her job. She compiles reports and displays tons of tons of data in an easily understandable way. This skill is very important in the field of clinical trials and statistics in general. As Kaitlin and I made our way through lesson after lesson online, we quickly realized that sharing a computer to program wouldn’t work. Therefore, Erika tried to set up our personal computers so we could do the SAS online training there.
Our technical difficulties continued as I could not get the software to completely boot up and Kaitlin could not get it to download. While we waited for our computers to cooperate, Kaitlin and I had lunch with some of our co-workers. I had a very in-depth conversation about spaghetti squash (which was my lunch today), college, and traveling in New England. Once my relaxing break was over, I went back to my computer to try to troubleshoot the issue. After watching many YouTube videos and reading loads of articles, I was able to reconfigure my settings to support the software. By 2, I began to continue my online lessons. There are 11 total lessons that I need to complete before I can receive my certificate. However, each lesson takes so long to complete.
Kaitlin was not able to get her computer working, so Erika sent her to NC State to ask the IT department. I stayed for an extra couple hours chipping away at the lessons. I only got to lesson 7 so I will need to finish the rest tomorrow. It is important that I finish the SAS online training because I will be using what I learn now to manipulate data from the Brachyury trial next week. After hours and hours of programming, my brain was fried. I would like to say that I learned to love programming today, but I did not. However, I did learn that programming is not something I would like to pursue as a career!
