A long time ago, a friend posted a comment on my blog that said, "Love to hear about the job..." So here's a day in the life at the Centre for Program Evaluation - yesterday, actually.
7:20 hop on bike. Beautiful morning to bike in - 50 degrees and a bit overcast. I ride by an off leash dog park, guaranteed for at least one smile a morning.
7:45 arrive at office. do some reading online about AusAID's discussion of development effectiveness
8:00 realize i've sent the wrong time info to Michael Scriven in CA and have missed a call with him to touch base on his upcoming visit. Call a bunch of his contact numbers. Don't reach him. Sigh.
8:15 buy the research staff who are in so early a coffee (after arguing with them about whether or not I'm allowed to buy them coffee). They bring me a chai in my mug from the cafe in the next building. The barista says to my staffer, "This is Amy's mug, right?" :-)
8:30 more reading about AusAID, pull open various docs from our evaluation capacity building work with Manila post, rummage interview topics out of the emails, put all the interviews for the next week in my calendar. Send emails to our contact person in Manila to check a couple phone numbers.
9:00 Receive an email that my materials for the workshop have been printed. I'm giving a one day pre-conference workshop on Immunity to Change for Evaluators at Australasia Evaluation Society conference next week in Brisbane.
9:30 meet with my two TAs for Mixed Methods research. We're teaching the subject (which is what they call a class; they also say "paper" for class, which I still find confusing) this semester and re-building as we go, due to a last minute change of instructor roles because two days before the semester the sessional (i.e., adjunct) lecturer found out her 80% job wouldn't let her work for us. The subject had some copyright issues, so we're revising content, building quizzes, setting up online communities, and figuring out how to do some face to face meetings with our local Melbourne students.
10:30 check in with our research staff who are madly writing away on a report for the contract we have to evaluate the implementation of the national teacher standards in Australia. Remember that I need to mark proposals from our Capstone students. We're offering that subject for the first time and I'm coordinating that. Thank goodness we only have 12 and Brad and Janet are helping.
10:45 prep for my interview with one of the counsellors at AusAID Manila. We've been engaged with them on evaluation capacity building since last December. We're prepping for our last week-long visit in September. We go up and deliver lectures and workshops and consult with staff on their evaluation work. During that week we have a 1.5 hour strategic planning meeting with their Senior Management Team, and I'm interviewing each of them individually over the next week to ask them questions about success and what they pay attention to in order to understand how they're making progress (or "how they're going" as Aussies say).
11:00 Call Sam at AusAID, no answer. Try a different number - wrong number. Double check numbers again, find his number in a old email, try again. Contact!
11:35 Skype fail when my auto-replenish doesn't auto-replenish. Throw some money in the skype meter, call Sam back. Much laughing about Skype fail. More laughing about "Speed Dating" on our agenda for the visit - it's how we're going to have staff share the projects they've been working on with each other.
12:15 Greet our brown back lunch guests, Anthea and Zita, who are coming to get some feedback on their one day workshop for the Australasia Evaluation Society Conference next week. Realize there isn't time to go get lunch and be back in time for their presentation. Grab a cliff bar from my desk drawer.
12:30 Sit in with Brad, one of our teaching staff, listen to Anthea and Zita, eat their delicious snacks instead of my cliff bar, give feedback.
1:30 Interview with Peter and Julie from AusAID Canberra (the home office) to prep for the visit to Manila in September. Bring Peter into the vision/indicators discussion.
2:30 Check my 3 phone messages and call back one of Michael Scriven's former students living in Melbourne to arrange for them to have dinner when Michael is here in 10 days.
2:40 Marion (our fabulous administrative assistant) stops in to tell me she's got a student who wants to add Mixed Methods and it has to be done today because the census date (end of possibility to drop/add without penalty) is tomorrow (Saturday)
2:45 Call that student and then our student services office to get that sorted out.
3:00 Check in with our research staff who are madly writing away on a
report for the contract we have to evaluate the implementation of the
national teacher standards in Australia.
3:00 Remember I saw an urgent email from Janet (the boss, who is working from home recovering from surgery) about a student. Check the email, realize that somehow he's enrolled in a subject we aren't running and we missed getting him into the one we are and that has to get sorted today. Call the student service centre again, get his phone number in Thailand, call and leave him a message, send and email to get him switched.
3:30 Meeting with someone from the Provost's office, our Grad School of Education Marketing person and representative from Melbourne Uni Commercial and three folks from Open University Australia. Fun conversation about the possibilities for teaching through them. Agree to pilot test for the university, then think about how the heck we are going to get all my work covered so I can get our curriculum revised and ready to go online by February. And pause a moment to be amazed by how I've arrived here at the right time for this work. Hah. God is good.
5:00 Glad handing with the online folks. Then checking in with the staff writing the report, they don't need me yet. Check emails, wrap up some details for Michael's visit, get ready to be out of the office all next week in Brisbane at the conference.
6:00 Start helping the report writing team on revising the discussion section of the report. Hand out the last of my all time favorite peanut butter pretzel cliff bars (which have become a staff favorite, along with dried mango from the Philippines) for some brain food. Work until 9:45 when the report is wrapped and out the door.
10:00 Arrive home after a beautiful bike ride - breezy, 40 degrees, only one pedestrian who jumped in front of my bike and tried to get run down.
10:15 Chuckle in amazement at my life. It's awesome to be living here in a great apartment, doing a job that is chock full of stuff I love (a bit too full on a day like today), with great people, and crunchy, fascinating problems to tackle. And how hard work means I'm ready for opportunity when it shows up. Did I mention God is good? Surely what's coming is far more than I could ask or imagine!
Friday, 30 August 2013
Monday, 19 August 2013
BICYCLE! Part 1, Dec 2012
Soundtrack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GugsCdLHm-Q
When I first arrived in Melbourne, I didn't have a bike - it was in the shipping container. When I was staying at University College, it didn't matter too much since it was a 20 minute walk to work. When I moved to Steve's it was a 40 minute walk to work, or two trams, which often ended up taking 40 minutes anyway. (I just realized recently that I could have done it on one tram in 20 minutes by walking an extra 5 minutes...) Anyway, Steve's place happens to be right next to Southern Cross Train Station, which is one of the hubs for the Melbourne bike share, http://www.melbournebikeshare.com.au/station/southern-cross-station
So I thought I'd give it a try one morning in December.
Here's how it works: You bring along a credit card. If you don't have a helmet, you can get one for $5 from a vending machine, because you are required by law to wear one. This is really handy if you happen to be riding your bike home from the bar at 3am and your helmet is at home and your bike is at the office... not that I would know anything about that. Anyway, when you're done with the helmet, you can return it to a 7-11 where they'll give you $3 back. Or you can just keep it and use it because no one is going to steal your $5 blue helmet, and if they did, so what? You can just get another out of a vending machine.
Once you have a helmet, you swipe your credit card at the bike share station, it gives you a code, and you get to choose your steed. If you follow the link above you can see how they've got them lined up by the train station. You adjust the seat (or if you're me, you ride 5 blocks and then adjust the seat), strap your bag on the front if you'd like, and you're off to the races. And hopefully no one is going too fast at the races because the bikes are sort of ungainly. But good enough, three gears, sturdy and completely unglamorous - not unlike the helmets. Totally not worth stealing, even if I hadn't given my credit card info.
I chose a helmet from the vending machine, picked a steed, loaded on my giant green tote, and hopped on. I rode successfully to work through the CBD (Melbourne's downtown Central Business District), riding on the left hand side of the street in the bike lane, ("stay to the left, the left, the left," I chanted to myself the whole way) and parked my bike at the bike share station 2 blocks from my office. Sweet! I took a picture with my phone to commemorate surviving my first bike ride - so here's my trusty steed, and me.
Later that week I had the grand plan to get a bike share bike and ride to work (which I did), then use the bike share bike to go look at a place to rent. The viewing was over lunch and the location was sort of close to work, but not walking distance for a middle of a workday adventure. So I walked up to the bike share with my code, only to discover that if you want to use the bike again ($2.70 AUD is good for all day as long as you don't have the bike for more than 30 minutes at a time) you have to have the same credit card. Which, of course, was safely back at my office - a 10 minute walk away. So much for the lunch time apartment viewing. Maybe I should have stuck with the biking and then I wouldn't have broken my foot... although for as hard as I had to concentrate to stay on the left back then I think walking was probably less risky overall.
When I first arrived in Melbourne, I didn't have a bike - it was in the shipping container. When I was staying at University College, it didn't matter too much since it was a 20 minute walk to work. When I moved to Steve's it was a 40 minute walk to work, or two trams, which often ended up taking 40 minutes anyway. (I just realized recently that I could have done it on one tram in 20 minutes by walking an extra 5 minutes...) Anyway, Steve's place happens to be right next to Southern Cross Train Station, which is one of the hubs for the Melbourne bike share, http://www.melbournebikeshare.com.au/station/southern-cross-station
So I thought I'd give it a try one morning in December.
Here's how it works: You bring along a credit card. If you don't have a helmet, you can get one for $5 from a vending machine, because you are required by law to wear one. This is really handy if you happen to be riding your bike home from the bar at 3am and your helmet is at home and your bike is at the office... not that I would know anything about that. Anyway, when you're done with the helmet, you can return it to a 7-11 where they'll give you $3 back. Or you can just keep it and use it because no one is going to steal your $5 blue helmet, and if they did, so what? You can just get another out of a vending machine.
Once you have a helmet, you swipe your credit card at the bike share station, it gives you a code, and you get to choose your steed. If you follow the link above you can see how they've got them lined up by the train station. You adjust the seat (or if you're me, you ride 5 blocks and then adjust the seat), strap your bag on the front if you'd like, and you're off to the races. And hopefully no one is going too fast at the races because the bikes are sort of ungainly. But good enough, three gears, sturdy and completely unglamorous - not unlike the helmets. Totally not worth stealing, even if I hadn't given my credit card info.
I chose a helmet from the vending machine, picked a steed, loaded on my giant green tote, and hopped on. I rode successfully to work through the CBD (Melbourne's downtown Central Business District), riding on the left hand side of the street in the bike lane, ("stay to the left, the left, the left," I chanted to myself the whole way) and parked my bike at the bike share station 2 blocks from my office. Sweet! I took a picture with my phone to commemorate surviving my first bike ride - so here's my trusty steed, and me.
Later that week I had the grand plan to get a bike share bike and ride to work (which I did), then use the bike share bike to go look at a place to rent. The viewing was over lunch and the location was sort of close to work, but not walking distance for a middle of a workday adventure. So I walked up to the bike share with my code, only to discover that if you want to use the bike again ($2.70 AUD is good for all day as long as you don't have the bike for more than 30 minutes at a time) you have to have the same credit card. Which, of course, was safely back at my office - a 10 minute walk away. So much for the lunch time apartment viewing. Maybe I should have stuck with the biking and then I wouldn't have broken my foot... although for as hard as I had to concentrate to stay on the left back then I think walking was probably less risky overall.
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