I learned a lot about social science research in this job and began to build the confidence to suggest changes and help with their process and tech stack.

It was in this job that I caught the development bug. In order to do good analysis of the large datasets I was looking at, I needed to write code to digest the data, clean the data, and prep the data for analysis. Automation became fascinating to me.

I found the idea of writing instructions for a machine to do my repetitive work much more attractive than doing the repetitive work manually. I also found that I came to understand the problems and the intricacies of the work better by writing my own data import and cleaning code.

I built a little personal database to help manage common questions and response scales. I also started writing some VBA scripts to prep data for running more versatile analysis options using desktop analysis software.