Jasmine Harrison

Weekly Journal Entry 5

This week, I was able to meet a lot of new people. This is super common due to the

nature of the work I do. We have a lot of partnerships and projects that we work on related to

our grant. It is a great opportunity to make new connections and see different perspectives on

the problems we are trying to solve. On Monday, I had a self-workday where I worked on

more data cleaning for Cardiff. I also spent some more time becoming more familiar with R

and using RStudio. I was finally able to finish cleaning all the data provided by Grady

Memorial Hospital.

On Tuesday, I spent the morning working on Albany Police Data and tried to edit the

data to better match the Grady data. In the afternoon, I had my BOLD weekly check-in

meeting with my small team. We talked about our progress on our activities and the new

ideas that we had. One of my team members brought up a good idea about creating a

checklist for people with new dementia diagnoses. It would be a resource that would contain

steps for finding support, doctors, and other important sources. We brainstormed some ideas

that would be extremely useful. Another one of my team members presented a survey that we

had drafted with UGA for physicians. We all added input on how to make the survey better.

On Wednesday, I had another self-paced day tackling more data. This was the last few data

files from APD, so I was happy that I had finally gotten through it.

On Thursday, I had a meeting with the GARD Outreach and Partnership Monthly

Meeting. It was interesting drafting up ideas to help further the activities that the committee

works on. The meeting had members from a wide variety of companies and organizations

that were all invested in dementia and people living with Alzheimer’s disease. The other part

of the day, I was finishing up data cleaning for APD when I noticed that there was a problem

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with some of the variables. It was the end of the day when I noticed, and everyone was

offline, so I was unable to get help.

First thing on Friday morning, I reach out to one of my coworkers to see if she could help

with the problem and what to do. We double-checked the original files to see if something

had been messed up during the data cleaning, but the mistake was in the original file. We

searched through our files to see if there were notes on what to do if the data doesn’t

correlate with the correct variable. In our search, we found the original code and plan for

reporting race and gender. We had a good discussion about how it would be a good idea to

revisit these variables to be more inclusive and efficient when collecting data. We sent this

idea to our manager to see if she could provide more insight and direction, but I hope that I

will be able to help with improving Cardiff data collection. We were also able to reach out to

APD to get a correction on the file and received a response and a new file relatively quickly.

I finished the week by finally catching up on all the data cleaning.

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DATE TIME IN LUNCH/CLASS TIME OUT HOURS WORKED

Monday 9:00 AM 12:00-12:30 5:30 PM 8

Tuesday 9:00 AM 11:00-1:00 4:30 PM 5.5

Wednesday 9:00 AM 12:30-1:00 5:30 PM 8

Thursday 9:00 AM 11:00-1:00 5:00 PM 6

Friday 9:00 AM 12:30-1:00 5:00 PM 7.5

Total Weekly Hours 35

Total Hours to Date 126

WEEK 5: