DATADATADATA

I am an epidemiologist. For those who do not know, an epidemiologist studies disease frequencies and their associations. I am also a statistician to some doctors. A statistician in research provides results from raw data. In effect, I am also a research consultant, who gives advice to researchers. But the great bulk of my work deals with processing data. You know, generating tables, interpreting them - the likes.

I forge data into meaningful information like a blacksmith forging useful tools from an ore. In the lifestyle I am in now, I feed on, breathe and live for data. When I wake up, the first thing I think of is what data will I process and to which doctor will I give them. My eight-hour job dictates that I process and verify our office data. When I go to sleep, I sigh thinking of what pending data I had left for the next day to process. To give you a picture, I was once entertaining about five doctors with different data sets in one day while in PhilCAT office with its own data that I had to work on. So imagine how my mind works when a doctor calls and discusses his research on a particular disease to me then another consults a completely different topic, one after another.

I was hungry for data at first, thinking that data were goldmine for researchers, wombs of scientific knowledge. I came to PhilCAT thinking that I might learn and find a good thesis topic from their data for me to graduate my masters. It turned out their data were insufficient, leaving me working for an organization (with a good cause but bad politics) without any direction for my future career as an epidemiologist.

I have come to a point that the ore I use can no longer be forged to tools, at least tools for my use. I had been working on different sets of data that seem to have no meaning to me anymore. I don't say I don't have perks for this racket, I mean, I get some monetary gains from this and I get to associate myself with doctors who think I'm smart. In humanitarian terms, I was able to help other people learn something from what they took effort to work on. But the fulfillment of personal discovery of truth for the contribution to humanity is what's lacking. I am not empowered to do my own research. Not here in my work. Not now.

So you see why I have issues when it comes to data. And somehow I see my degradation in my output because I'm burning out; to think I once dreamed of becoming the best epidemiologist of our time.

Next month, I will start teaching statistics to music students in Santa Isabel College. Now this is something new and quite challenging, for statistics seems to have no use to music students, or so they thought. I may be sick and tired of processing data, but not doing and teaching research.

But for now, I'll just hang on. Kaya ko pa naman.

A joke just came into me.

Data to death ito.