Joe Purdy is inducing melancholia today, the kind that comes on quiet afternoons when I'm alone here. Today I realized I've been here long enough that I needed to dust the bookshelves. In my mind, and occasionally in conversation, I still refer to Columbia as home. I'm settling here, but it still doesn't feel like home. It feels like this house is home, but it's just in a neighborhood that's very far from the town I live in.
It's been a whirlwind few weeks. My job officially started, and I'm learning all about how university finances work. It's a lot of stuff I never thought I'd know or even need to know, about how grant funds work, how hard it is sometimes to just buy a stapler, and how many different kinds of funds there are and what you can and cannot do with each one. It turns out to all be distressingly complicated. It's my job though now, and I knew that coming here. On the bright side, I like knowing how things work, and I'm getting to learn a lot of things that most professors don't know, so when I go back to grad school and become one, I'm going to have an advantage on this front. It does require a lot of training though. This coming week alone, I'm taking two and a half days of training - Intro to University Business Administration, Internal Audits, Purchasing 1, and Purchasing 2. Yes, it takes 2 classes to learn how to buy stuff. Then in October, there's another class I have to take to get a purchasing card. Oh yeah, and eventually I will take Grants Reconciliation, which is like learning how to balance your checkbook, but it's all our grants instead.
Trying to balance all that with my research responsibilities has been the difficult part. I learned how to put together an NSF annual report this week - how the FastLane interface works, all the things that have to be submitted, etc. I had to drop everything else I was working on, but it felt really satisfying when it was done, and it's one of those things most people don't learn until they have an NSF grant and have to do it for that grant. Once again, I'm learning things that are really going to come in handy later.
Socially, I'm still finding out where I belong here. I went to the Cville Skeptics get-together yesterday and I think that will be a good group of people. The UU Fellowship is good, and I'm meeting people at work finally. But I'm lonely. I miss my friends, I miss my family, I miss my familiar places.
I did find the take-away creperie though, so that's promising... Today is also the Top of the Hops beer festival, which I won tickets to, so Laura and I are going together, and then after that is Symphony Under the Stars, a free concert put on by UVa. Tomorrow is a quiet, be at home work day.
It's been a whirlwind few weeks. My job officially started, and I'm learning all about how university finances work. It's a lot of stuff I never thought I'd know or even need to know, about how grant funds work, how hard it is sometimes to just buy a stapler, and how many different kinds of funds there are and what you can and cannot do with each one. It turns out to all be distressingly complicated. It's my job though now, and I knew that coming here. On the bright side, I like knowing how things work, and I'm getting to learn a lot of things that most professors don't know, so when I go back to grad school and become one, I'm going to have an advantage on this front. It does require a lot of training though. This coming week alone, I'm taking two and a half days of training - Intro to University Business Administration, Internal Audits, Purchasing 1, and Purchasing 2. Yes, it takes 2 classes to learn how to buy stuff. Then in October, there's another class I have to take to get a purchasing card. Oh yeah, and eventually I will take Grants Reconciliation, which is like learning how to balance your checkbook, but it's all our grants instead.
Trying to balance all that with my research responsibilities has been the difficult part. I learned how to put together an NSF annual report this week - how the FastLane interface works, all the things that have to be submitted, etc. I had to drop everything else I was working on, but it felt really satisfying when it was done, and it's one of those things most people don't learn until they have an NSF grant and have to do it for that grant. Once again, I'm learning things that are really going to come in handy later.
Socially, I'm still finding out where I belong here. I went to the Cville Skeptics get-together yesterday and I think that will be a good group of people. The UU Fellowship is good, and I'm meeting people at work finally. But I'm lonely. I miss my friends, I miss my family, I miss my familiar places.
I did find the take-away creperie though, so that's promising... Today is also the Top of the Hops beer festival, which I won tickets to, so Laura and I are going together, and then after that is Symphony Under the Stars, a free concert put on by UVa. Tomorrow is a quiet, be at home work day.
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