This morning I worked my hardest to try to make more progress with the VBA code, and every time I hit a wall I pressed on and tried to work a step ahead to see if the path was any easier from there. SPOILERS: It wasn't. The main issues of the morning were that A.) the sort function was still not working, and the internet seemed pretty certain that my syntax is already correct, B.) creating a new worksheet was becoming a pain, C.) chart objects and creating a chart was incredibly easy in Excel VBA, but not in Access VBA, and D.) I realized that there was a huge manual step that I had forgotten I did which will be incredibly difficult, if not almost impossible to code. With these in mind, my morning soon became incredibly frustrating and filled with a slew of tabs open to StackOverflow, Mr. Excell, and various other VBA help sites. 
    In the afternoon I had my interview with Anissa, who is an ethnographer investigating the way we do research in the DSSG program. It was nice for me to have a chance to take some time and really reflect on my experience this summer as part of the program. Retrospective consideration for how something went can be useful, and for me I think this interview allowed me to see all the ways this program has helped me grow and why this was a good experience for me right now. 
     Almost immediately after my interview with Anissa, Anat showed up and we had a mini-meeting to talk about where I was at with the VBA code. After seeing my hold-ups and frustrations, Anat agreed that this might not be possible to do in the given time frame with Access VBA. We decided that my updated goal would be to work with the VBA and see how much I could do for two more days next week, but then by the end of Tuesday I want to have a text file that gives explicit instructions on how to replicate the work I did, going from whatever point I get to by that time. While this is not ideal, it seems like the most practical solution right now, and it takes a bit of the weight off my shoulders now because I don't feel so much pressure to fix every single little VBA issue. Also, if I finish this up by Tuesday, this gives me three final days to help my team with any last minute tasks or analyses they need me to do. 

     My day today consisted of working on VBA code, VBA code, and then some more VBA code for the projections macro (see yesterday's post for more details). I'm supposed to have it all wrapped up by tomorrow, but it still seems a bit unlikely. The thing is that since I don't know VBA very well some steps in the process are very simple and just require me looking up and finding the right code to use. Other steps I think are going to be very simple, but due to some ridiculous syntax set-backs it actually ends up taking all day and another StackOverflow post to just simply sort a single column. I did make some significant progress though, and maybe if things go miraculously well tomorrow morning I'll be able to finish by the time Anat and I meet in the afternoon. Otherwise, I'm preparing to work on this next week, too. It'd be nice if I could finish it quickly though because then I could help my team more with the other analysis.
     Best part of the day by far though was watching the Republican Primary Debate on Fox News with my team after happy hour. We even went and got popcorn to watch during the show. And boy, was it a show! Politics aside though, I was really glad I got to spend some time bonding with my team, especially since it's getting really close to the end of my time here. I'm also really grateful to be in a work environment where all the people are intelligent, well-informed and fun to have conversations with. I'm going to really miss being around them.
    

     Today I had many classic coding moments. You must realize, that all I really wanted to do was copy/paste data from Access to Excel, which sounds incredibly simple but in VBA can be a nightmare when things go wrong. First, I got to the point with this VBA code where I decided that it was just about the worst language ever written, there was absolutely nothing wrong with my code and it just hated me, and I also understood none of what it was actually doing. Even more and more google searches later, I got to a point where I had no more errors, but the variable I needed most kept getting set as null or empty, when I wanted it to basically have all the data I need. Eventually, I got to that point where I figured out that the I was beyond even the help of the internet, I had tried posting on StackOverflow, I had already posted a message to our work group asking if anyone in the office knew much about VBA, and it seemed like I was a lost soul fighting for a lost cause. So, by now I'm pretty much crying and have completely given up on the idea of this ever working, so I started looking into the next things the VBA code will need to make graphs, which will only be neccessary or work in the alternative universe where I somehow figure out what's wrong with the original problem in the code.
     Then the gods finally saw the river that had formed from my tears, and decided to send some angel to comment on my StackOverflow post and help me finally get some data into my recordSet variable. Granted, this led to a considerable amount of more problems and errors, but at least I could find solutions to those in the corners of the world wide web. Eventually, we got to this glorious, wondrous moment where I saw this:

That's right! I finally got to where I could copy and paste data from Access to Excel by calling a SQL query. I can't even begin to describe how happy I was when I saw this. You have no idea how many empty, very empty, Excel sheets I had opened before I finally got this gem. 
      Ok, granted the VBA code is no where near done, and actually I need to do this for a different SQL query, but this is a wonderful first step! I just hope I can get the rest of it done tomorrow so I can give it to Anat on Friday, because if tomorrow is anything like the last two days have been, it might be incredibly challenging.
      Also, this afternoon we had a design tutorial taught by Joe. It was pretty cool to talk about, even though I'm not sure I took away any novel information from it. We did a team activity where we actually went through the functional design process for ATM transactions. If you want to see some of the notes from what we did, check out the following text file.

     I came in early this morning to help out with the Early Engineering Program in which Anat was leading a session that we helped shape and create. Remember forever ago when I wrote up a simple lesson on battery interrupters? Well, that was for this program. There were about eight high schoolers in our session, and we just went over the basics of electricity and circuits with them today, with the intention to go over battery interrupters and more about circuit building tomorrow. Unfortunately, I won't be able to help out tomorrow again because we have a presentation at the DSSG studio at the same time, and I just need more time to be working on my main project. There was a great range in the levels of knowledge from the kids in the session, and that made it a little difficult to cater to everyone. However, I think they really enjoyed working with the circuit simulators on the computer and I think that all of them learned at least something more about electricity and circuits.
     Afterwards, since we were already together Anat and I decided to go out for our end of the program lunch today. We went to the Washington Club on campus and it was really nice. They have a spectacular view from their dining area. I was glad I got to talk to Anat one more time just about random things before I finished up for the summer. It's sad that she won't be here next week for my last week of work, but that's alright because I'm sure I'll be plenty busy anyways trying to finish stuff up.
    In the afternoon I was working on the VBA macro for making projections. This was the project I started with at the beginning of the summer before the DSSG program officially began, and while I did finish making the projections at the time, I never actually packaged up the VBA code into a macro that the King County Metro folks could easily just run to create more projections later based on different data. There were only a few steps I did manually when making the projections, like copy and pasting from Access db to Excel, and making the graphs, but somehow these are being very difficult to program into the macro. I need to get it done by Friday though, because Anat wants me to give her the code and make sure she can run it too and it will still work. Deadlines here we come!

     Monday morning started today with a presentation from Bethany Gross, who is a Senior Analyst and Research Director for the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). This presentation was really cool! They were focused on research that was trying to explore how giving all high school students in the Denver area would allow different students better options for what schools they would be able to attend. As it is, students from families of certain backgrounds are more likely to live considerably farther away from the better schools, and therefore they are often limited in which high schools they can go to because some of the better schools are prohibitively distant from their homes. It was interesting to think about all the different factors that would come into play when looking at transit data and where Denver students end up going to school in relation to their homes. For example, what might be prohibitively distant for one student from a certain family, might not be too distant for another student who comes from a family that can drive them to school, or that lives in a safer neighborhood. A good portion of their presentation was filled with the DSSG interns asking more probing questions about other factors that might come into play with this data, and I really liked this discussion because to me it showed how much more inquisitive and critical thinking the DSSG program has helped us become. 
     Since I got caught up in the presentation, I ended up being pretty late to the TCAT weekly meeting, and I got there right as Anat had just left. Zhitao told me he thought they had gone to her office, but after making the trip downstairs she wasn't there either, and I realized my whole trip to CSE had been a waste. After emailing Anat to let her know, we set up another meeting in the afternoon instead. At that meeting we talked about what else I need to get done before the end of my research, since there are only nine days left! Also, Anat will be out of town next week, so my last day with her will be this Friday. With this in mind, we decided to meet Friday morning to make sure everything was good. I need to have a draft of the technical paper that DREU requires I write about my research, and she wants me to have the code for the projections (the ones I was doing at the beginning of the summer) all packaged up so I could give them to her and she can make sure that she could run them on her own computer. 
     This afternoon we also had our last reading group. My group was pretty excited for it because the topic was transit and transit data. We talked about passive data sets versus designed data sets (a reoccurring topic from some other reading group discussions), how this affects and creates problems with selection and representation, what privacy concerns arise with these data sets, and how researchers with sometimes little or no background in the given domain try to use these data sets to analyze the situation. It was an interesting talk, and I thought it was a good last reading group because it brought up a lot of the issues with data that we had touched on in other talks previously.