Where There is a Will - 13. Increased Mobility Leads to More Supplemental Income

 With the summer weather and my bicycle, my mobility has vastly improved. I found many more "additional income opportunities." Got a house cleaning job. Get to go to their house at Asbury and Grant every other week to vacuum clean both floors, mop the kitchen and toilet floors, clean the toilets, make bed, and remove trash - three hours of work at $6 per hour! Do the same at their neighbour's house on alternate weeks. The house owners have so much trust in me that they sometimes leave the key in a prespecified secret place for me to take and enter the house to clean it, when they have to be out! I also find occasional help needed for window cleaning and lawn work for pay at $6 an hour. My bank savings are now building up! **********

I have no coursework during Summer. I am assigned a Special Project, but Dr. Peterson did not expect much and there was practically no work to get credit! By now I have become very proficient in using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). I was doing regression analysis and factor analysis on the Research Demand Survey Data. It is a pleasure to go and work in the computer centre. There are consultants to help debug the code and help me learn and move on. The undergraduate student consultants are sometimes unkind - Gokman calls them "insultants". But the Statistical Package Consultants - Phil Burns and Mina Hohlen - are experts and very friendly.


My first Autumn in Chicagoland.
Northwestern University in Evanston - Colourful Autumn
My wife and children have gone to Madurai to stay with her parents. I am getting mails regularly from my wife and my father-in-law. I hope I can finish up my work here on time and return home to be back with my family. I need to sign up for 2 more courses (6 credit hours) and try to finish up my research. I signed up for Introduction to Urban Transportation Planning and Urban and Regional Analysis. Both are within the Civil Engineering Department. I am starting on the statistical analysis of the research data collected.  These were the data collected by sending out questionnaires. The task involves using SPSS to do Factor Analysis and reduce the 20 or so factors affecting the recreational demand behaviour of the residents into a few dimensions. Then I need to develop a stochastic model to predict the recreational demand in terms of the identified dimensions.  Looking back, I see how what I learned in my courses are being used in applied research. The system, the syllabus/curriculum and the Professors are really great. ***********************