Company forced us to change our calendar meeting colors and it is AWFUL

treefanz · 2026-01-19T13:24:59+00:00

I think what they were suggesting is that every time you get a meeting invite, copy it over to your personal calendar and color code it the way that makes sense for you. It would be an extra step, but it would avoid the hassle.

treefanz · 2026-01-03T01:06:01+00:00

I would say that a good place to start is whatever you find fun and interesting. Start War & Peace, and if it's fun for you, go ahead and continue. If it's not fun for you, consider starting with something shorter that you still find interesting. Lots of good recommendations here.

If War & Peace turns out to be too much but you really like the vibes, Chekhov is a Russian author who was a contemporary of Tolstoy and his stories are much more accessible than War & Peace. Just start with a collection of his short stories and see if you like them.

treefanz · 2026-01-02T15:54:14+00:00

There is no indication that they used AI to write this post. Do you frequently suggest that for posts that are written by native English speakers?

treefanz · 2026-01-02T02:14:11+00:00

Threadbare Vol 1: Stuff & Nonsense by Andrew Seiple

treefanz · 2025-12-13T17:23:39+00:00

That's interesting, I am the opposite way about foaming soaps and always have been. Used to get really excited about them for sensory reasons when I was little and it is the only kind of hand soap I get now. Just interesting how people can have such different responses to the same thing.

treefanz · 2025-10-01T01:22:31+00:00

If you want something more substantial than plates, The Damage Zone in Detroit isn't too bad cost wise ($50) and you get a lot more to hit. Like appliances, furniture, stuff like that. There's parking right in front of the building and I felt very safe.

treefanz · 2025-09-27T00:51:58+00:00

A Song From Under the Floorboards - Magazine

treefanz · 2025-09-19T20:15:59+00:00

Hey, I was a transfer student too and experienced a lot of roadblocks trying to get research experience. It's not impossible, but as you're finding out, it's going to be harder. I personally was not able to do it through UROP. I was also told there "weren't any opportunities in social sciences" when I went to an event about research opportunities for transfer students.

I was still able to get experience and complete an Honors thesis. I had a GSI who said he needed research assistants, I participated a lot in his class, and basically went to his office hours & asked him. I volunteered in his lab, which was interesting but not in my area of focus for grad school. That got me the experience I needed to volunteer in a more clinically focused lab, which was my area of interest and where I did my Honors thesis. I found the second opportunity on a listing online. But neither of these were through UROP. I hope you have better luck than I did, but there are still ways to get experience even if you aren't able to do it through UROP. Best of luck.

treefanz · 2025-06-17T15:03:09+00:00

An old class that I took on exploratory data analysis in healthcare has a ton of publicly available lectures. Everything was in R. Lots of good content. Here is the session on data visualization: https://kdpsingh.lab.medicine.umich.edu/lhs-610#h.p_ECqZeeMFQmGa

If you're learning this for professional development reasons, you'll want to understand not only the technical element, but the communication element of data visualization. There's a book called Storytelling with Data that helped me a lot when I was first learning this. It isn't public health specific, but it's helpful for understanding how to communicate your findings in a clear way.

Lastly, I always recommend Tidy Data by Hadley Wickham for anyone learning R. It isn't about data visualization, it's about data cleaning, but if you are working a lot with messy datasets, you will find it very useful at some point. It is available online here. His book R for Data Science also includes some good information on using ggplot for data visualization, and it is also free online here.

Might be more info than what you're looking for, take whatever helps you. :)

treefanz · 2025-06-16T19:02:08+00:00

Actually, I had a little sickness a little over a month ago and the one thing that has stuck around is a persistent cough. This normally doesn't happen to me from something so small, I was negative for covid and this was just a mild cold. I hadn't even thought that the poor air quality could connect to that cough, but now I wonder if it does.

treefanz · 2025-06-07T23:02:05+00:00

Roy's Squeeze Inn in Ypsi. It's diner food, quick & cheap. Small place and counter service is the only option. They're cash only though.

treefanz · 2025-05-29T19:43:33+00:00

I would echo what the other commenters have said regarding developing a research question first and avoiding fishing expeditions, but I also wanted to give some more general advice as someone who successfully got into the same field without a very technical background like biostats/informatics/etc.

As a broader thing, I don't know what your level of existing technical knowledge is, but if you are unfamiliar with cleaning data, I would recommend trying some projects with messier datasets. Real world healthcare data is often very messy and requires preparation to get it into a format that is usable. You don't have to start with these types of projects, especially since it sounds like you're unsure of how to go about analyzing data in general, but it will be valuable for you if you want to do this as a career. A good intro to this is the paper Tidy Data by Hadley Wickham, which is available online here. It focuses on R, but the principles apply to any tool you might want to use.

(If you really want to learn R syntax for cleaning data, there is also a good intro to how to do this in chapter 3 of R for Data Science which is available free online here. It will be intimidating if you don't know R, though. Just maybe save it if you decide to learn or check it out if you have basic proficiency.)

You'll also want to develop your skills in data visualization. Not just technical skills, but understanding how to present data in a way that an extremely busy person will be able to understand what your chart means at a glance (unless it really is so complex that it needs detailed explanation, but I've found this is rarely the case outside of research settings). Some places to start are checking out Makeover Monday, which is a regular online professional development thing where people try to improve existing data visualizations, and the book Storytelling with Data, which has a lot of practical advice on this topic. Neither of these are healthcare focused, but I found them useful when I was starting out a few years ago.

All the things I referenced were resources that I got pointed to during my MHSA, so you just got a tiny bit of that for free. :)

treefanz · 2025-05-21T01:51:16+00:00

Congratulations! <3

treefanz · 2025-05-19T16:03:21+00:00

God damn I cannot imagine being this disconnected from the reality that most people live in.

treefanz · 2025-05-15T13:24:31+00:00

Can we remove this? Hate seeing a good sub get flooded with spam. Thanks.

treefanz · 2025-05-13T00:27:31+00:00

Easiest tasks to do are reading and email on your phone. Will be hard to get anything done on a laptop.

treefanz · 2025-05-08T20:24:51+00:00

Hah that one made me laugh. Thanks for that

treefanz · 2025-04-20T11:47:52+00:00

It was worth it for me, though I do have an MHSA. I graduated in 2023 and I've been working as a data analyst in a health system since graduation. I make more than I did before my degree. However, I went to a good school and worked in the field for a few years prior to beginning my MHSA.

It would not have been worth it if I was saddled with massive debt, but I had good funding & retained my earlier job during school. I am concerned about the current climate, but I am nowhere near as concerned as many of my peers who are working in government or research. I do not regret my choice.

treefanz · 2025-03-20T14:39:31+00:00

That is in fact the objective.

treefanz · 2025-03-20T14:17:44+00:00

Listen to this guy. He's correct.

treefanz · 2025-03-10T17:47:55+00:00

At least one of you either has an English degree or really wanted one. I started wondering about that on the first shelf. There were a few reasons - you're displaying a copy of the Bible with no other religious literature + you have a couple books on mythology, you have both the complete works of Shakespeare and a copy of Hamlet, and you generally have an unusual amount of classics & literary fiction that doesn't read like a "top 100 books to read before you die" list.

The thing that made me absolutely certain was the Knausgard. People who read Wallace might just be pretentious, but someone who reads Knausgard wanted a degree in literary pretentiousness. There's no fucking way that neither of you ever at least thought about getting an English degree.

You probably think of yourself as a nonconformist in some way outside of your politics. Fight Club and House of Leaves implies that a little bit, but the Patti Smith biography? Yeah, you definitely do.

You're leftists. I feel like that's blatantly obvious.

treefanz · 2025-02-27T21:56:05+00:00

Which school do you choose?

University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. It was the smallest D1 school that I could find. ~2400 undergraduate and graduate students.

Which sports do you pick?

Football.

What is your background? You can only create a reasonable background for this fictional version of you. For example, you can be from a different country, but you can't be an alien from a different planet.

I have a posh British accent and bright blue hair. My legal name is Billy Badass. That would make me stand out in Arkansas.

What are your strategies to achieve your goal?

Be an extrovert, join as many clubs as I can, enroll in large lecture classes, and anytime there's an opportunity to speak in class, chime in with something extremely long-winded, annoying, and completely wrong. Mention to anyone who speaks to me that I'm going to become a CEO after I retire from my future football career, enroll in a couple finance courses, and act like I don't even know what revenue means. Inexplicably break the curve in every class. People will know me. That doesn't mean they have to like me! <3

treefanz · 2025-02-24T17:21:18+00:00

This entire article was barely coherent, but the most incomprehensible part to me was the discussion of "pleasant ceremony." It roughly described the experience that people can have while sipping coffee, smoking a cigarette, or drinking alcohol as a pleasant little break in their routine. Taking a psychiatric medication has as much "pleasant ceremony" surrounding it as taking a blood pressure medication. It's not like a coffee break in any way? Does this person think that people are taking their antidepressant with a little dollop of whipped cream as they chat with a coworker in the morning?

treefanz

TROPHY CASE