First off I would just like to say that I enjoyed meeting everyone who was at the training workshop!  I had a lot of fun and I’m glad we had the opportunity to meet, hang out, and talk about our experiences!

Now onto the real entry:

Not a whole lot has happened since my last entry aside from the training workshop which everyone already wrote about.  We are finished with the main part of our field season so we’re in the data entry stage now.  It’s a big change from being out in the middle of the desert all week to staring at a computer screen in the air conditioning all week!  But I am not complaining, it was over 115 degrees in the Las Vegas valley last week!  Although it’s usually a little cooler at our field sites, it’s still obscenely hot out there!

We are starting to learn how to run some statistical analyses now.  I don’t know about anyone else, but I have less than very little stats experience (one class in high school and one in college – which turned out to be basically the same class, I didn’t learn very many new things in my college stats class), and the stuff I did learn is not very helpful for the kinds of analyses we have to do now.  Most of the things our mentor says goes way over my head, but I will eventually get the hang of it!  I think the hardest part for me to wrap my head around is that Excel doesn’t do much.  Apparently you go out and buy (or download for free) stats programs to do the more involved analyses and multivariate stuff.  And then you go out and buy (or Google for free) books that explain exactly how to code what you want those programs to do to your data.  My coding skills are zero….Wait no, Friday I was able to get the program (R) to pull up my data table from NotePad!  I will count that as 0.00001 skills since it’s better than nothing!  Hopefully by my next entry I will be a stats wizard and you will all be jealous of my amazing coding skills!