How do you cope with not being able to understand things

Just ask questions, assuming you never said prior to the job "yea I am an expert in SAS" then no one can complain if you ask.
 
Cambofrog said:
Two simple points.

1: Teach yourself SAS programming in your spare time and at your leisure using books or internet resources dedicated to the subject.

2: Don't post in GD on a subject like this where you will get mostly moronic, unhelpful replies. :)
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To be fair to GD I am shocked at the sensible replies so far.

I may bite the bullet and ask for it to be explained tomorrow or at work after the course if I still am too stupid to understand it.
 
cymatty said:
They knew I had never used it before.
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Clearly the rage thing is the problem, it's something personally dealt with and mostly overcome I think. The other problem for me was being paranoid about looking stupid and asking questions I thought would make me look dumb in front of others.

Now I just ask questions left right and centre, if they think I am dumb because of it... well **** em ;) I am still doing my job, getting paid and enjoying the work more. Worst that can happen is they under estimate me.
 
cymatty said:
I may bite the bullet and ask for it to be explained tomorrow or at work after the course if I still am too stupid to understand it.
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I don't think anyone will take the time out to fully explain it to you mate.

You need to read up on it as you would learning any new API.

Read overviews, examples and tutorials, then consult the API documentation for specifics.
 
if you don't understand something, the quicker you ask the better in my opinion. If i don't get something I will **** myself off, get angry, call myself stupid, torment myself that others are picking it up quicker, panic and then finally get a grip :p

I started my job in Feb and I was very stressed because the guy before me hadn't made probation and my mate had stuck his neck out to recommend me. It took a while but now i'm much more confident and i passed probation last week \o./

PS i do find i'm slower at picking stuff up a lot of the time, but if i do the extra and keep at it I feel I do a better job than most in the end.
 
Cambofrog said:
I don't think anyone will take the time out to fully explain it to you mate.
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Sorry I should have been clear, it is not the whole thing I am struggling with (although I am picking it up slowly) I am struggling with a particular function, the substr for those who care. :)
 
When I encounter something genuinely hard (normally maths!) I tell myself I'm too stupid to understand it, and let myself get depressed and angry about it. Sometimes it's just a way to avoid doing difficult things, by telling myself I'm too dumb to do it I don't have to try to do it.

But then I really don't enjoy the unique feeling of mental pain that comes when you're trying to comprehend something, and it either doesn't make sense or you don't even know where to begin... Can lose hours staring at a problem and not getting any closer to solving it.
 
I put my hand up and ask more questions regardless of how many other people do get it or don't.

If it then fails to sink In I start to fade away and not pay any attention, which is a bad thing I have recently got into the habit of not doing, I then usually ask my mates if they can explain it differently.

If I still can't get it I just ignore it until I feel I need to use it.
 
Usually get angry if it takes too long to understand when I really should or need to know. Come back to it a few hours later and it will usually make sense.
 
cymatty said:
I started a new job in January and I have to admit from the outset that I think I have struggled, (even though every appraisal has been positive and I received an award for some work that I completed). I have contemplated leaving, because I had a terrible week which nearly pushed me over he edge. I was talked out of it.

The biggest cause of my misery is SAS, I have never programmed before and as I dont use it all the time I am picking it up slower than the new people who use it most days.

This has been brought into stark contrast this week when I have been on a SAS training course with work, everyone is is soldiering on and I was OK until today when I started to struggle and not follow what was going on. It was at this point I default to my usual behaviours which are,

1) Start getting angry with myself
2) Getting really angry with the person teaching and the question in my own head (I am very polite if the teacher comes over)
3) Go silent and into my shell (so much so that the teacher commented on it to the whole class, cheers :rolleyes:)
4) Get more angry with myself
5) Check out of whatever I am doing, even if I understand the question by this point it is too late I have convinced myself I can not do it
6)Occasionally it will get so bad that I stop eating for a day or so and cant sleep ( I think this is some kind of subconscious self punishment)

So is my reaction OTT or do people have similar reactions?
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I feel your pain re SAS I was forced to start using it a while ago best bet is to get hold of SAS EG if you can you can then build queries using wizards and if necessary see the code behind them. You can then albeit slowly start to understand a bit of base and SQL by reverse engineering.
 
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cymatty said:
Sorry I should have been clear, it is not the whole thing I am struggling with (although I am picking it up slowly) I am struggling with a particular function, the substr for those who care. :)
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OK, I looked at the SAS documentation for the substr function

I've got to admit the SAS documentation sucks (never used it myself).

But anyway, it looks like SAS indexing is 1 based (ala visual basic) rather than 0 based (ala c based languages) and seems to alow single quotes around strings.

For now, just ignore that previous bit, it's just to give context to programmers in other languages.

Examples:
substr('OCUK',1,4) would return 'OCUK'.
substr('OCUK',2,3) would return 'CUK'.
substr('OCUK',3,2) would return 'UK'.

So the first example reads:
Starting from the first character in 'OCUK' return the next four letters.

The second example reads:
Starting from the second letter in 'OCUK' return the next three letters.

The third example reads:
Starting from the third letter in 'OCUK' return the next two letters.

If you have any questions, just ask mate
 
I normally end up zoning out then having to look stuff up in books later and spend ages figuring it out. I know that not concentrating will just make the problem worse, but when I feel like I don't understand something, it makes listening to the seemingly nonsensical words of the 'teacher' extremely difficult. Also of course by zoning out, I then miss bits that I might have understood, making the eventual learning process longer. Essentially, I end up with a wasted session If I don't understand something, and just have to use my books. If I ever get somewhere where there aren't any books on a topic, then I'll be a bit stuck.
 
Probably not a terribly helpful post but my way of dealing with it is acceptance.
By which I mean, sometimes I don't understand something and I don't really do much about it, just muddle through and hope I never need to put what I'm supposed to have learnt into practice. I kinda 'dodge' the issues and if it is a classroom environment I'll just file it away as something to avoid. So if there are two ways of doing something and I only understand one of them, I'll keep it that way and just use the one method, even if it is suboptimal.

As an example when it comes to SQL I tend to use subqueries a lot (as opposed to joins) because that's something I'm comfortable with.
 
Cambofrog said:
If you have any questions, just ask mate
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Cheers for that, makes it easier to understand. The issue I had with it was linked to using it in a slightly more complicated scenario,

eg a question today was something like

ID is 123-456-456
Name is Brown Bill Mr

Remove all the - from ID (not a set length)
Rearrange name to Mr Brown. (not a set length different obs will obviously have different lengths)

So hopefully with the understanding of the substr and the other things I "learned " today I may be able to get further than two lines even if I cant complete it.

Thanks for the help :)

Just need to stop the rage.
 
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