JajaLala

Today I succeeded at a thing at work that I thought I couldn't do! The long story made short is that certain powers-that-be changed the program that we use to do a certain thing, but gave very little instructions on INSTALLING the program, and so I had an extended number of meetings with IT and ad-hoc consultations with people who got it working in wholly separate orgs from me, and I got it MAYBE working but couldn't get it to actually work with the thing we have as far as I did it....

( The arc of my struggles )

Anyway this morning I told some coworkers it might be a huge fire on the horizon and that I wouldn't be able to get A Certain Thing done until maybe January, but now after pushing through it?????? I'm like "yes I AM the expert, and I've done the hard part of A Certain Thing so it could be done as early as tomorrow if I can complete the last necessary steps" (which should be the same as previously and well documented, so fingers crossed that is much simpler).

Sorry this is super vague bc if I tried to get into the technical details it would be a much longer post, but I feel like a strong super cool and competent employee, especially since just a few days ago (and even weeks ago when first wrestling with IT about the new software) I felt very hopeless and lost and now I'm like !!!!! I am nearly at an End Product when I thought I would be completely unable to get to this stage without Team Leader's help, I am smarter than I think and buckling down and pushing through self-doubt and hopelessness can bear fruit!

Aaah finally finished with a large set of work meetings I was running with a coworker, now feel incredibly relaxed. It's something that was spread out over four days, and I haven't felt like I've been able to fully chill until the very end of this last meeting.

Really loving my current job and workplace; this was challenging but honestly it was mostly headed by my coworker while I did a lot of background stuff I was more comfortable with. There were a few little disasters with the software we were using for the meetings, but now I am very well equipped to handle similar issues in the future. As it turns out, doing (and failing at times and having to scramble for a fix lol) is one of the best methods of learning there is.

Now my boss has expressed a desire for me to branch out into some programming stuff, which is one area I REALLY love. My work is sort-of in the research realm, so programming is often used for projects and data stuff, but it's one of those skills that not everyone in the industry has or needs. Back when I first interviewed for this position, I remember sharing really passionately that I enjoy coding and learning new languages, and that it was one of my favorite parts of my previous job. Although it's been about a half-year since then (how the time flies!) it seems my boss remembered I expressed an interest and is now actively giving me an opportunity/excuse to learn more.

I'm still decompressing from the stressful past few days, but soon I'll be digging into SQL and SAS. To be honest I don't know a ton about them, so if you're reading this and know about them feel free to drop some hot tips. Excited to take them on soon!