a new job

This week has been long and crazy.

First of all, it's approximately 1,000 degrees. This temperature makes it very hard to dress for the day. As there is about a 10-minute walk from Hal's parking to my building, any effort I made to look professional ended up in a sweaty mess. Much discomfort and pony-tails ensued. On Thursday, I even walked home. The 25-minute trek lasted almost eight years, and when I walked through the door, I almost collapsed. It was ridiculous.

The craziest thing that happened this week was on Wednesday. Now, on both Monday and Tuesday I had some light orientation activities. Wednesday was completely bare because it was the day that the school was training its new AIs (which are TAs, but called something different, which is disconcerting because when I see that, I think of the Haley Joel Osment movie --- on a side note, whatever happened to good ol' Haley Joel? IMDB lists Haley Joel's next movie as called Home of the Giants, in which he plays a journalist(!). Maybe he can hook up with Lohan so she stops being crazy. He seems like a nice kid.)

Anyway, the school was training its AIs. I did not have to be at school because I am not an AI. However, I got up at about 10:30 and was surfing my various email accounts and blogs o' friends, and I decided to check my IU email. In my IU email I had received an unexpected email from the dean. The title was "Assistantship?" Seems as though one of the graduate assistants couldn't work her schedule with the class she was supposed to help out with, and the dean thought I would be a good person to take her place. Fabulous! A little more money for me to pocket, and a good experience to put on my CV at some point in time, especially since I want to teach.

So after seeing the email, I called the dean and affirmed that I would LOVE to be an assistant. I am going to be assisting with a class called J110 -- which is basically like Journalism 101. The prof is incredibly nice and funny, and his syllabus cracked me up all morning. I will be in charge of managing students who try to give excuses as well as grading 3 tests and a paper. The class has 160 students in it, so this is no small order, however. I also get to keep office hours.

I rushed to school and tried to catch at least a little bit of training. I did do that indeed. I also was able to make it for "Campus Climate" training (read: sensitivity training!) the next night.

The classes start Monday. My assistantship is on Monday and Wednesday, which will be my busiest days. My profs are starting to put their syllabi on line, and it looks like I'm going to have my work cut out for me. I'm glad I have only 9 hours.

I've gotten to talk more and more to the other students, which is nice. We had a cocktail and food party at the dean's house last night, which was incredibly nice of the dean. It was fun to talk to people -- our class has some incredibly diverse interests.

I've been really impressed with the way we have been welcomed and treated this week. We had a meeting with editors of local publications on Tuesday, and the editors were all incredibly welcoming and wanted us to work with them. I was pretty excited about all of that.

Hopefully, the excitement will continue when I start classes. We were talking last night about how on Monday it's real and it will be hard, after that, to leave. Because then you'd be "that girl." :) Hopefully, I won't be that girl!