me + my job

It was a pretty successful week, all in all. I’m a little bit flummoxed by saying that, insofar as I’m so used to apologizing to myself and others that I am not getting enough done. Then again, I rarely have a bad week in this job due to directly task-related factors. Politics is another question, but every job has that. In some ways, because I’m out of the academic chain of command now, and in the administrative command, but spend very little time working with people in my administrative upstream but mostly as a consultant to the academic side, it’s the best of all possible worlds.

This week:

• While cleaning files, found a student whom a not very funny comedy of errors had left hanging, and through a series of bureaucratic maneuvers, got her graduated and her diploma backdated. Score. Probably the thing I’ve felt best about this month.
• Held yet another advising session entirely in Spanish. So it’s not all gone. I don’t like these, because what I’ve been having to say is more or less, “Your English is not well enough developed for university study.” Oddly, I still remember the subjunctive of the verb, fracasar.
• Got someone’s financial aid reinstated.
• Got someone into the office of victim advocacy. Not the first time this term, either. I’m being vague on purpose. This is a part of the job I am not trained for and which exhausts me. At least that student will now have a trained counselor.
• Met a freshman who wants to be a medieval history professor and, I think, probably has the intellect to do it. Met another one who wants to be a state prosecutor. Met a third one who wants to teach high school history. Got the third one switched to the social studies education major and got them all enrolled correctly in the best courses for them.
• Met about a dozen transfer students, all of whom are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. While probably should make me reflect: initial advising appointments are probably my favorite part of the job.
• Went to a meeting about the campus’ average LSAT scores which, while tedious, garnered me some interesting information that I can employ usefully when I have the chance. Learned a lot about the law schools our graduates choose and why.
• Had a long meeting with the new campus internships czar, and drafted a bunch of related documents.
• Finally got the detailed course descriptions to hang off the search schedule correctly.
• Wrote one of those documenting, defensive memos that set the world on fire. Metaphorically. Ah, the joys of the bureaucrat.
• Reassured at least six faculty members and one staff member that coming administrative changes would not mean the end of the world.
• And bull’s-eye: a student came back with a charm against misfortune, for me, from the shrine at Kamakura. Master strike of advising — she mentioned something tangentially in an appointment, I ran across something that I thought would be of use to her, and next thing I know she’s got herself on a trip to Japan. Now she has a middle term career goal and is thinking about graduate school. This is what is supposed to happen.

On the negatives list:

• My planning for a number of fall events is behind (career sessions, common reading) because of all of the extra work on the schedule.
• I have a meeting on Tuesday about the Spring 2016 schedule that I am not ready for.
• I have no solution to the enrollment problems I’ve been charged with analyzing.
• Someone is supposed to find time to observe me soon and I don’t know when this will happen.
• I am behind on pre-Orientation notes for this week.
• My office is a ridiculous mess, to the point that it is bothering even me.

Had a meeting with my lead and they are preparing promotion materials. I’ll admit that I feel a certain amount of disorientation with regard to the praise I get in this job all the time — although I am also overqualified for it, so if I weren’t doing well, I’d wonder about myself.

At the same time:

• I still have not mastered how to have lunch successfully while working 9 to 5. How hard can this be?
• I don’t move enough during the day. The climate also mitigates against this at the moment. I don’t want to go outside to walk around when it’s sunny, 92 degrees Fahrenheit, and 85 percent humidity.
• These two problems are related to the fact that I have not mastered stopping in the middle of things. I am still working more than forty hours a week.
• I’m increasingly troubled by the relationship between the university and the student lenders. Least said about that best, I suppose.
• I am eating my feelings again, for the first time since 2010. I thought I had learned how to combat that particular problem, but apparently not.
• And that relates to the really big problem, which is that this job leaves me awash in other people’s feelings to a degree that I am unprepared to confront.

My mother told me when I was 18 that she thought I would be a good psychologist and when I asked why, she said, “You’re a really good listener.” No career aptitude test that I have taken has ever suggested that (they have always said the same four or five things: musician, academic, clergyperson, marketer and occasionally physicist [but my math is inadequate to that]). I may be a good listener but I do not know what to do with my advisees’ feelings when they are gone. They echo through my brain after work.

Which I suppose brings me to the next evaluative post.

~ by Servetus on June 22, 2015.