For anyone who's ever studied in any discipline of social science, at some point in your life, you've made your unfortunate acquaintance with SPSS. The acronym in itself is pretty self-explanatory in terms of its importance in your becoming of a data-saavy social scientist: "Statistics Package for Social Science". I used to have this incredible fear for SPSS back in my sophomore year in college, when all the students in the College of Communications were required to take "Research Methods". As if the course alone was not overwhelming enough, all students were expected to learn the software SPSS, if not master it and apply it to life cases.
It could have been because there were all these rumors about how disgustingly confusing and complicated the software was, how miserable it could make your life, and in general how much of a pain it would be in the you-know-what. I've never really taken a liking for SPSS and was lucky enough to have had a professor who spend in total only two classes out of our 18-week semester on the dreadful software. I had secretly gleed over my narrow escape from the evil clutches of this hell-spawn software, but if only I had known better...
Three years after, I find myself face-to-face with the same archnemisis I had so naively believed to have defeated. Frustration does not begin to describe what it feels like to have to deal with this plague of a nightmare on a near day-to-day basis. Yet, to be able to retain what little sanity is left in me, I have come to terms with this cyber fiend, and surprisingly enough taken on a whole new interpretation of what its acronym stands for.
Stop Pouting Start Smiling.
I think this could very much serve as the ultimate motto that I should have engraved somewhere on my body just so I make it to graduation. I have made it The Lesson throughout my 15-month US Edu-xcursion, the Mission: Impossible to permanently discard all negativity in how I take on the world and whatever it throws at me. Let it be SPSS, or some headache-inducing financial statements, or disoriently ambiguous case write-up assignments, or the abysmally gloomy weather, or not having decent warm clothes to suit up for such weather, etc., I will be constantly reminded with that invisible tatoo of mine, and smile right on back (although these days it could very likely be a grimace masquerading as a grin) to all the statistical and financial and tedious and seemingly never-ending horrors in my ever-so mundane grad life.
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