(no subject)

I'm having a bit of culture shock in my new job, because it's not nearly as formal as the old job was. (What do you MEAN I can just write one invitation letter for the curriculum committee, address it "Dear Committee Members" and send it to all 25 invitees with one email? I don't have to write 25 separate emails? What do you MEAN I can write to the entire Advanced Graduate Education student body and all the course directors and start the message "Hello All"? I wouldn't have dared, but somebody else did it first.) It feels really weird, but it's a smaller school and dealing with students isn't the same as dealing with senior faculty. I knew that was going to be the case, but it's still taking some getting used to.

I am, however, accomplishing things despite the weirdness. The thing I'm proudest of is finding out yesterday afternoon about a meeting tomorrow, and having room and lunch and materials all sorted out by noon today. I guess we don't usually provide lunch (culture shock again!), but since we're trying to get students to come to these meetings, the best way my boss and I could think of to do that is to feed them. I've also been messing around with data, and creating charts, and learning a whole new set of abbreviations (TxCA? FRTx? CDG?) and generally trying to figure out how the job description fits into reality. One thing they didn't tell me about was the new student orientation, which requires my presence at 7:00 next Monday morning. But I get to go home at 5:00 and it's only one day, so it's not worth agonizing over the way I agonized over P&R. Especially this time, because nobody expects me to have any idea what I'm supposed to do yet, so they're perfectly happy to tell me "Stand there and hand these out".

One foot in front of the other, I guess.