Open In Case of Friday Emergency

/Personal
It hangs on my office wall… looking ominous

Students and Staff alike often wonder…

… What is in this mysterious manila envelope taped to my office wall. Well, here’s the story. Friday, September 2, 2016 was the last day of a crazy week. My first year as FYS Coordinator, I had a ton of things going on at the beginning of that school year. And this was about 2 weeks in, when I sat at a point of utter exhaustion. After speaking about this exhaustion for quite a few days in advance, I walked into my office to the following scene.

So now you know… inside that envelope is the contents to remedy another Friday emergency!

DSU Probs: I Need My Schedule But Forgot My PIN!

/DSUProbs

DSU Probs is my series of informative blog posts for Delta State Students. Other schools may use similar systems, but your mileage may vary.

Need to find your current schedule but you don’t have your PIN? It’s easy – just log into DSU Online Services (By going to http://www.deltastate.edu/mydsu) and click on “View Registration Information”. Here’s what the button looks like:

Help… After 14 Years, I Still Haven’t Figured Out How To Blog Regularly

/Personal

They say that you never stop learning, and I hope that’s true because there is still so much for me to learn. Like how to remember to update my blog regularly. About 3 months ago I started trying to make at least one entry in my Day One journal per day, just to have something to look back on. Perhaps this school year I’ll try to extend this mindset to my blog. Averaging a new post every 4 months… I don’t think I can get any worse!

DSU Probs: I have an Override but Banner Self-Service Still Says My Class Is Full!

/DSUProbs

DSU Probs is my series of informative blog posts for Delta State Students. Other schools may use similar systems, but your mileage may vary.

Did you get an override but DSU Online still says your class is full? This is because the system doesn’t check to see if you have that override until you try to register. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Log into DSU Online and get to the “Register for Classes” screen.

2. On that screen, click the “Enter CRNs” option at the top

3. Type the CRN number for the course into the CRN box, and hit “Add to Summary”

4. Click the Submit button at the lower right to attempt registration. It should now allow you in, even though the class is full. If not, contact your advisor with the full error message you receive, so that the issue can be corrected.

Monday Haiku Revisited

/Personal

An artist named Mike Meulstree took my Monday Haiku from a few months ago and made a very nice piece of art! Hope the struggle isn’t too real for my readers and friends today!

Load Data From Your R Script Directly, No Files Needed

/Technology

Ran across this nice little trick a few months back. One of the things I miss about SAS was the ability to copy/paste data directly into a SAS script. While it’s nice to load from an external file, for small datasets it can be more useful to have everything in just one file. This is especially useful with students who have trouble understanding the concept of a working directory or file paths in a smartphone app dominated world.

Here’s what I found months ago (I believe on Stack Overflow):

Input = ("Student Pretest Posttest
A 25 27
B 23 23
C 21 22
D 23 29
E 23 24
F 21 19
"); 
Data = read.table(textConnection(Input),header=TRUE)
t.test(Data$Pretest,Data$Posttest,paired=T)

There are no line numbers on that snippet – you’ve simply got 5 variables with 5 lines of data. The data is then read through a textConnection function into a data table. You can now work with it as you would any other data set.