Posts

Showing posts from August, 2013

Lost

In my last post I talked about the frustration of a broken social contract, and it seemed to be a continued theme with other articles about the same thing. Many other people are lost in this world and many are worse off than me in many ways. This past week we lost a great dog. Daisy was the center of our home life for years, we made decisions around her and structured our lives based on her needs. Even my morning routine had several stops along the way to take care of Daisy. Our evening routine typically consisted of “bedtime potty” and encouraging her to go, and if it was raining we had to decide who was going to let her out in the middle of the night. So we’ve lost many of our routines and are finding new ones. My husband lost his job this week as well. While it does make things more financially difficult, it’s more about another routine broken, minutes and hours are lost in trying to find new routines. We’re looking to lose less money on things, cutting back on spending, makin

How's it Feel to Want?

While I enjoy learning from working as a staff assistant in an academic department, I still look for professional positions. The nice thing about where I live is that it gives me access to two different job regions, all within an hour commute. My current position gives me access to a lot of professional development training along with the ability to sit on committees with a wide variety of professionals across campus and the school. I really enjoy working at my current university, it’s very student-centric with student success as the most important goal. I truly believe that almost all student can succeed in the right program with the right support, so I think I fit into the culture well and I’d love to stay here. I’m usually a fairly positive person, I can (usually) find the silver lining and keep a good attitude when all else seems lost. Lately, however, I’ve taken job rejections really hard, almost personally. I’ve been applying for jobs now since 2010, sometimes more actively th

Enough is Never Enough

We’ve all “had enough”. It’s when we get to the highest point of frustration, when we can’t go on any further because of someone or something. We’ve all said “enough is enough” when we’ve worked and worked and worked at something and someone or something still needs more. But I want to talk about something bigger, not just us as individuals, but as, say, a department. We work towards our own departmental goals, graduation rates or creating new classes or the newest trend. We work with other departments and sometimes we rely on those other departments. I was in a meeting where this scenario came up: Professor Flowers suggested we create a new class (focusing on safety and usage) to allow students from Basket Weaving (BW) to use the Post-it Note Making (PITNM) supplies. Right now students from PITNM cannot use BW supplies, but Professor Flowers decided it was time for us to break down the silos and start collaborating for the sake of our students. Professor Coffee stated that while i