The data analysis course gave me a vocabulary for something I’d been doing instinctively. In the third week, the professor showed us a framework for identifying variance in patient flow data — where the bottlenecks were, statistically, versus where they felt like they were — and I recognized the approach immediately because I’d been doing a version of it with observation and Excel spreadsheets for years.
“You have intuition for this,” the professor told me, after a session where I’d asked a question that apparently anticipated what she was about to cover next.
I said I’d been working in operations for a while.
She said that was useful but not the same as analytical fluency, and that the course would give me the second thing to go with the first.
She was right. It did.
By the end of October I had a portfolio section I hadn’t had in September. I had a certificate program record that would appear on my professional profile. I had a better answer to the question of what distinguishes me from other clinic operations managers with eight years of experience.
The position at the larger health system hadn’t been posted yet, as of late October. I’d been watching. I knew the timeline was approximate. I wasn’t in a hurry — I was building something, not escaping something, which is a different speed.
Sophie and I had dinner in late October. A real dinner, at a restaurant we’d been saying we’d try for a year. We ordered wine and looked at the menu for longer than necessary and talked about our jobs and her apartment situation, which had been complicated since her lease renewal, and my course, and the wedding.