Jenny Spencer

It’s me!!!

The snow was barely there and has already mostly disappeared but the potato enjoyed sniffing it for a few minutes anyway.

One week left to submit your abstract, short course, symposia or to participate in a Clinician Crosstalk working group. Don't delay, submit today! loom.ly/u9d7XKI

Exciting news that the Society for Medical Decision Making is now on Bluesky! Follow for all things related to advancing better health through better decisions and updates on the 2025 conference in Michigan! #MedicalDecisionMaking #SMDM #MedSky #AcademicSky

Map of the world with purple and orange pins in different locations covering the eastern US, the UK, and several points in Egypt.

Jenny Data part 2: Travel locations this year included 12 states in the US + 2 countries (not counting a few hour layover in Rome) for a total of 22 different places.

(Map: Orange= work; Purple= fun)

Graph showing cumulative travel days - the x axis shows months of the year and lines show increasing number of days over the year for three years: 2022, 2023, and 2024. 2023 and 2024 show similar patterns but 2022 is lower than both.

Jenny Data Part 1: My travel this year was about the same as last year - a total of 102 nights away from Austin (vs. 105 last year and 92 in 2022).

That's 28% of my time spent traveling - just under half of that was travels by car (including now) with Pearl 🐶 along for the ride.

"The reward is the work...", she whispers to herself as she googles "r ggplot change axis ticks" for the fourth time today.

Update: The math was wrong.

"Thanks for inviting me on this project. Quick thing - All this math is wrong. I don't know what you did yet, so I can't tell you what's wrong about it. But my whole body knows it's definitely wrong, and I have a PhD, so you have to just trust me and we have to redo all of it." -Me, today.

Will any company or organization that I have interacted with even slightly this year think to send an email today informing me that the thing *they*, in fact, are grateful for today... is *me*?

Gee I hope so.

Another day reflecting on the huge portion of my job that is writing letters from ~other people~ to tell ~some third set of people~ how good I am at my job so that those people will pay for me to keep doing my job and or give me awards that the ~first other people~ can write about in more letters.

The Lusted pitches remain one of my favorite parts of #SMDM23. Funny and creative and interesting. Great job to all the nominees!

How could I be so silly, of course half these files are in a Dropbox folder and half of them are in a Sharepoint account I have through the University of Sydney. 🤦🏻‍♀️

I like working across multiple collaborative projects but it's worth saying that like 90% of my time is figuring out whether the stupid files are in Box, Dropbox (if so, is it UT or Harvard), or Sharepoint (if so, it is UT or UNC)?

Various administrative folks in the University keep asking me about my funding - which feels the same way as telling the US government each year how much you paid in taxes. Don't *you* handle all this in the first place?