Yesterday was the first day of my new job as an Assistant Data Manager in the Data Transfers Department at PPD. So far, so good! My job involves managing data, as the job title suggests. More specifically, I’m responsible for ensuring that lab results, patient demographic information, etc. are clean and ready to transmit to the drug companies (Merck, AstraZeneca, etc) and then transmitting that data to them on a periodic basis. It’s not as boring or monotonous as it may sound - I’ve found it very interesting so far. However, training has been slow this week, as Takeda has been auditing our lab this week, thus occupying my boss. (We got an excellent review, by the way!). I’m anxious to jump right it, though. I’ll be programming in SAS and while it’s not near as great as my favorite programming language, Perl, it doesn’t seem like it’ll be too difficult to pick up. The company is sending me to a training in a couple weeks, so that’ll help out.

It has been a little weird starting a new job in a different department at the same company. This is the first time that I’ve been in this situation. It’s great to be able to concentrate on learning a new job while not worrying about getting to know the company itself or the co-workers, but it is going to take some adjustment to being back in an enclosed cubicle as well as dealing with the different environment and atmosphere that exists there. I’ll miss my friends in Support, but at least I’ll still be able to see and hang out with them. My new co-workers are nice, so I’m hoping to develop the same report with them, though several of them are quiet by nature, definitely in contrast to Support.