Weeks 8 – 10: May 8 – May 28
Full swing into nursing homes data
Note: I’ve been keeping track of my time here with some notes, but haven’t had the time to post!
This month, I’m taking German classes at GLS, which is conveniently about a five minute walk from my apartment. The classes are a lot of work (lots of homework) and we cover quite a lot during class. In the last two weeks, I’ve learned how to greet people, how to tell people what I do and ask for directions. I’ve also learned a lot of food words, so now, I don’t have to carry around my list of words for meat items as I’ve gotten better at understanding the labels on things.
My class also has another American (from Boston), two from India, another from the UK and one from Turkey. The classes are solely in German and the teacher will get upset if we speak in English, so it’s really forcing me to speak the language and try to make an effort to understand what people are saying. In class, we have to give presentations about our hometowns and also talk about what we had for breakfast or what we do in our free time. I often just say I go running in the morning or “ich laufe am Morgen.”
Since I got back from Madrid, I’ve been working full swing on an investigation into nursing homes in Germany. The investigation looks at 13,000+ nursing homes throughout Germany and issues in the homes with their infrastructure. I’ve mostly been doing my analysis in R and SQL, but it’s been quite a bit of work since I’m working with little to no-knowledge of the cities and states of Germany. Every day I feel like I’m learning more and more and getting a grasp of the economic and social issues in the country, but it’s a lot to soak in to really make sure I’m understanding the investigation and the issues we are reporting on. On my own, I’ve been reading a few books and article on nursing homes in Germany so I can understand the data better.
Most of the days that I’ve worked in the newsroom this month was spent focusing on what data is relevant for the investigation. I also made some pivot tables and chatted with Daniel about the regional data for the different newsrooms that we’re partnering with. NDR (the public TV station) that’s doing an undercover documentary with us came in to the office to film us, which was also kind of cool. They interviewed Daniel and filmed the data team in action.
Along with the how-we did it piece for Correctiv, I wanted to write some English pieces for the project and publish them so that if people don’t speak German and live in Germany, they are still able to understand the project. With the time and edits of Lindsay and Erin, I worked on a SOURCE piece which will be out in June.
On the 18th, I presented at Hacks/Hackers about the EWA award that we won for the sports subsidy piece I worked on when I worked at the Chronicle of Higher Education and teamed up with the Huffington Post. It was a tough subject to discuss here, especially because US sports are their own beast and the culture of college sports taking money from universities just isn’t the same. The folks from the hacks/hackers meetup asked a lot of great questions and wanted to know about how the project is done. If you’re interested in reading more about how we did the data analysis for the project, here are the slides from the meetup.
—
Outside of work:
It’s officially my second full month here and I feel a little more acclimated to the culture and language, although there are still things that I find weird, like numbers on the trees (they track each and every one). I’m also getting to know people in my newsroom. On the 14th, I went to Daniel’s friends’ house to watch Eurovision. I had never watched Eurovision before in the States. It was the first time they showed the show in the US. To make sure I really understood the show and the concept of why the show exists, I did some research beforehand. From my research, I learned that Germany always ended up placing at the bottom of the rankings (poor guys!) and that some countries not in Europe, such as Australia were in the competition in the last few years. The show was as cheesy and ridiculous as I thought it was going to be. I ended up staying at his friends’ house watching the competition, until it ended a little after 1 a.m. The show was dubbed in German, so I didn’t really understand everything, but that didn’t matter so much because the singing was the most important part. The show host actually told the people to hurry up (when they were voting) which had to be one of the funniest parts of the whole show. The show was also super corny, so there’s that.
On the 15th, I went to the Carnival del Culturen with Simon and Stefan from the office. It was super rainy and it was quite crowded so it wasn’t really my cup of tea.
Comments are closed.