8.20 AM - Wake up and have a cup of coffee
I’m definitely not a morning person, so I like to sleep in as much as I can. Luckily, I live 5 minutes away from work! So it’s quite easy for me to get a good sleep in and still get to work at a reasonable hour. I love to start my day with a fresh cup of coffee, usually in the form of espresso from my coffee machine.
9.00 AM - Arrive at the desk
Our department is large, and every team is a little different, including what times we are expected to show up to work. In the branch I work in, Heath Economics and Modelling, our work times are very flexible! As long as I work 7 hours and a half a day, nobody is too worried about what time I start working.
Today, I arrived pretty much exactly at 9 am. There are not a lot of people in the office today; maybe it’s because some people are coming in a bit later, but also because a lot of people from my team like to work from home! This is another perk about working in this Branch: a lot of our daily tasks can be performed from anywhere, as long as we have internet access and our work laptop. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, our Department put a lot of work into accommodating people being able to work from home, where possible, and we now benefit from this even when restrictions are not in place.
Personally, I prefer showing up to the office even if it’s not essential. I live so close by, and it’s nice to be able to properly separate work and leisure. Additionally, I’m pretty extroverted, so it’s nice to interact with colleagues throughout the day!
9.05 - Planning the day and checking emails
Once I’ve settled in and started my laptop up, I usually dedicate the first part of the day to figuring out what tasks need to be done and organising my workload. Every day is a little bit different in this job: sometimes I might have one big task to do that will take up all day, while on other days I might have a lot of meetings on, or lots of shorter tasks.
The first step is to check my emails, in case any new urgent tasks have come up since yesterday. Fortunately, there’s not much in my inbox today!
I’ll then check my calendar to see what meetings I have on, make sure I’m prepared for them and get an idea of when I have ‘gaps’ during which I can get other work done. Today, my morning is particularly busy! I have meetings from 9:30 to 12:00, but fortunately, I don’t have to do much to prepare for them. In the afternoon I have scheduled a meeting to update my team on the work I’ve been doing this week. I’ve decided I should put together a short PowerPoint presentation for this since there are some graphs I want to show the team and slides are a good way to organise them. I’ll dedicate an hour to this after lunch, that will be plenty of time!
Since I might get a lot of feedback after this meeting, which usually means plenty of work to do, I might actually hold off on further planning and play the rest of the afternoon by ear.
9.30 AM - Meeting with mental health data experts
As a part of the graduate program, I have been assigned to a workplace project to be completed by a team of graduates across the department. It’s an opportunity for us to get a proper feel for what it’s like to work on a government project, and it empowers us with a degree of control that we may not have in other projects this early on in our careers.
My project aims to research the issues that young people face in getting help for their mental health conditions and what the government can do to meet their needs. We are expected to put together a report which will hopefully inform some policies or new programs down the line! We want to get as much expert advice as we can to point us in the right direction, and hence we set up a meeting with some experts in mental health-related data, from within the department, to hear their advice and learn from their experience.
Our building has a lot of meeting rooms for this purpose, usually consisting of a large table with many chairs around it and a whiteboard or two. They are very popular, so we always try and book these at least a week in advance!
The meeting participants were 4 of us graduates and 3 experts and it went for half an hour. We asked them a variety of questions that they were very happy to answer. I’m always very pleased with how respectful staff across the department are towards graduates: even though we are new to the job, everyone makes us feel like respected colleagues right away.
We left the meeting feeling confident that we’ve learned something: although we still need to do a lot of background reading and research, we got some very good advice on what data is and isn’t available, and where relevant information is most likely to be found.
10.00 AM - Monthly graduate meeting
Our previous meeting finished just in time for us to make it downstairs to our monthly graduate meeting. These are two-hour meetings in which all the graduates across the department are gathered, during which we usually listen to a talk about some aspect of working in the department, then three graduates give a short presentation of what work they have been doing and finally we get some spare time to network with other graduates.
Really, the aim is to give us visibility of the types of work that occur across the department and to bring up useful or important topics we should know about while working here. Because there are lots of us (over 70 graduates!), these meetings are held in a large theatre, very similar to a university lecture room.
Today, coinciding nicely with NAIDOC week, we had a panel session on diversity within the department. This session felt comfortably informal, where three senior staff in the department shared their experiences and their opinion on why it is essential to value diversity in our workplace.
12.00 PM - Lunchtime
Back-to-back meetings can be quite tiring, so it’s definitely time for lunch after that! Today I went to the local shops to grab a burrito with my partner, who is also part of the graduate program.
Although I often try to prepare my lunch at home, it turns out that the convenience of having food outlets 5 minutes away from the office tempts me into regular lunch burrito runs. Whoops!
A standard workday in our department usually involves a one-hour lunch break, but I prefer to make mine shorter so that I can go home earlier at the end of the day. I’m usually happy to just grab a quick bite to eat and then get back to my desk after about half an hour.
12.30 PM - Preparing to present my work
Now that I’m done with lunch, it’s time to get back to work and start preparing for my next meeting. I will be sharing my progress on the main project I’ve been working on.
One of the biggest pieces of work that my section has been putting together is what we call a ‘microsimulation model’: this is a computer model which allows for us to simulate how the characteristics of a population change over time. Our end goal is to be able to use this to predict future demand for healthcare services, which would be extremely useful to understand which areas of the health sector we should be funding and what changes we should make to best meet these demands.
My work has mainly aimed to improve how our model predicts how many people are at risk of developing a mental health issue. The way this is done is by doing a statistical analysis of which demographic variables (such as age, employment status, other health conditions etc.) increase the risk of various mental health conditions. It’s really exciting to be able to analyse real-world census data and get a first-hand look at how different factors affect the lives of our fellow Australians. Good data analysis can tell us so much about the world we live in, revealing details that cannot be seen with the naked eye in our everyday lives. This is why I am so excited to work in a role like this!
I’m now putting together a PowerPoint presentation which contains some graphs that show some interesting trends I found recently, as well as some that give an idea of how good our model is so far. To analyse data and make my graphs, I use statistical software called ‘R’, which is extremely useful for this kind of work. While my experience is mostly with other programs, I found R quite easy to pick up compared to some of the stuff I had to use during my PhD!
2.00 PM - My presentation
It’s time to show off this work I’ve been doing! Since lots of people are working from home, we held this meeting as a videoconference. I shared my screen and talked for about 15 minutes about what kind of analysis I’ve been doing, what interesting trends I’ve found, and finally what advice I have to improve our model.
All of this was, to my relief, very well received! We spent the rest of the meeting discussing these findings: I answered some questions about some of the finer technical details, got some advice and the group unanimously agreed with my assessment of what next steps should be taken. Big win for me today!
3.00 PM - Tea break!
After that successful meeting, I think it’s time to make myself a warm cup of tea! There are many kitchenettes throughout the building, with hot water, fridges, microwaves… everything you need if you want to make yourself a snack or a cuppa. The one near my desk is also nice and big with a gorgeous view out the window! I’m a frequent visitor around this time since I’m a fan of a warm drink in the afternoon. I brought in some fancy T2 tea today, and it’s really hitting the spot!
3.15 PM - Writing code for data analysis
With a plan for my next steps and advice from the rest of the team, I’m spending the rest of the day working on this project while the ideas are fresh and I have a solid 2 hours to dedicate to it.
The main task I want to focus on is understanding how much interaction there is between anxiety and depression: I noticed that these occur together very frequently, is this because they often cause each other, or do they just have very similar risk factors? Does this correlation imply causation?
When I’m starting a new analysis, my approach is to start with pen and paper and scribble down some thoughts and preliminary calculations to figure out my approach. Once I have some ideas down, it’s time to figure out how to practically implement my calculations: to do this kind of statistical analysis, I need to write a fair bit of code, and it’s important to lay out the structure of your code before typing it up. I like to use flow charts for this!
Now that I have a flow chart, it’s time to start coding! I won’t bore you with too many details, but what I’m aiming for is some code that runs a series of logistic regressions, each accounting for different variables, and then compare their accuracy.
I’ve made a good start, but it’s getting late. This process can take a while! Unlike what I experienced in university, here we do our best to keep our work within business hours, so I will call it a day here, rest up and pick up where I left off tomorrow morning!
5.00 PM - Heading home
At the end of the day, I lock my belongings in a secure personal storage unit. There is important information on our laptops and in our notes, so we need to be very aware of keeping it all safe. Some people opt to take their laptops home, but I like to leave mine stored in the office since I rarely work from home and I don’t want to be tempted to check my emails when I should be resting!
Today’s been a good day. Quite busy, but also not too stressful. Tomorrow I have fewer meetings, so I’m confident I can get a lot of work done on my project. But until then, I’m looking forward to eating the Bolognese I prepared last night and spending the rest of the evening playing Dungeons and Dragons online with my friends in Brisbane!