Week 6:
Red, White, and Whales

July 6, 2019

Due to the holiday this week, I chose not to continue calling. People would most likely be on vacation or out of office so instead I was focused on finalizing the YRBS report. If you recall from earlier in the summer, the YRBS was administered to all the High School and Middle School students in the area in the spring. Shortly after I arrived it needed to be analyzed and presented to a small group of stakeholders. At that time I was tasked with analyzing only 72 of the 89 questions from the 2019 data set. For the full report, I was asked to do the analysis on all 89 questions. The extra 17 questions did not take me very long and the report was done fairly early in the week.

Aside from this report I worked on cleaning my database. Since I’ve been collecting all of the data I have via phone calls (and I usually only have one hand to type) things can get a little messy, disorganized, or incomplete. By cleaning the data I am setting standards in the way I code the spreadsheet or making the responses fit into their respective categories. This will help those after me understand what I was doing if they were to look at my work, and it makes uploading the data into the Story Map software much easier. The next portion of my week was spent learning how to navigate and build Story Map’s themselves. To use this software well, one has to complete a specific training. Fortunately, the Office of Integrated Surveillance and Informatics Services was willing to send me all the training materials and the held a webinar with me to go over some of the key features.

This week was also broken up by a major holiday for a small town like Marion: the 4^th of July. Due to Marion’s location on the south coast, many people live here only in the summer. Coming here in late May, I was told that a ton of people would be coming in through the next couple months. On the Fourth, I saw exactly what they meant.  Every 4^th of July, Marion has a town parade in the morning and fireworks sometime over the holiday. The restrictions in Massachusetts (MA or Mass) regarding fireworks make them really expensive and the town fund raises every year to try and get them. This year they were able to raise enough money and we had fireworks on the Friday evening following the fourth.

These kind of small town celebrations remind me of where I’m from, they’re quaint and cute but a big deal to anyone in the local area and everyone comes out. The parade was mostly tractors and fire engines and the fireworks drew a huge crowd. Following the holiday and to kind of celebrate being half-way through everything with my supervisor, I thought we should go do something I really can’t do at home: whale watching. The tours for whale watching go out of two primary locations: Provincetown (on the cape) and Plymouth. We decided with the traffic on the cape it would be best to go out of Plymouth on our tour, early in the morning. It was an amazing tour and we saw three whales. The most active of these was a female humpback named Diablo. My supervisor recommended taking videos of the experience versus photos because the animals move so fast. That turned out to be sound advice and I got some amazing photos!

In Marion, I’m only a bike ride away from the beach, and with the warmer weather I have certainly been taking advantage of that. Swimming in the ocean has been a bit of an adjustment (I’m accustomed to freshwater) but you could say I’m making due. This week was a great change of pace as we head towards wrapping things up for the summer.