Category: Uncategorized

Special Assistant to the Director Interview

I interviewed Monday morning for the Special Assistant to the Director position for the Writing Center, a yearlong position open only to graduating tutors. The job is to essentially take on administrative responsibilities for the Center – the job description is as follows:

Special Assistant to the Director
The position of Special Assistant is a five-quarter-long commitment available to graduating Writing Center tutors the year following their graduation. This position provides both managerial and administrative experience.

Duties include:

  • Creating, compiling, and maintaining a weekly schedule;
  • Planning and implementing the fall tutor retreat;
  • Coordinating open and in-program workshops;
  • Meeting regularly with the Director of the Writing Center;
  • Planning and facilitating staff meetings;
  • Fielding questions/addressing tutors’ concerns re: WC operation;
  • Hiring tutors and receptionists for the upcoming year;
  • Hiring replacement Special Assistants;
  • Participating in collective decision-making with the Director and other assistants;
  • Developing and implementing innovative projects to improve the WC;
  • Revising and enforcing the policies in the handbook;
  • and, most important, tutoring students.

After working very closely with some awesome Special Assistants (four sets of them now – including singer/songwriter Devin Brewer all the way back in 2002), and because of my personal connection to the job, I decided to apply. Admittedly, it’s low pay with no benefit, but it’s not about the money for me, it’s about the experience and the chance to work with an absolutely stellar group of people.

The interview itself consisted of the two current Special Assistants and the Director herself. They asked a series of very probing and good questions to ask in any job interview, asking me about such things as conflict resolution, collaboration, communication skills, and what assets I would bring to the job. They also asked me to speak about one of my obsessions (“which one”, I replied, “I have so many!”) – I chose to talk about sustainability and talked a little bit about how I was thinking about the connections between sustainability and my other work. I then had the chance to ask questions, and I asked two that I felt were very hard and contemplative questions: Where do you see the Center going in the next year? What is missing from our efforts to support the campus in writing endeavors?

I think I did quite well, though I’m still looking around for other employment opportunities. The Special Assistant job is roughly 20 hours a week, so I still need to find something to cover the other part of the time. If anyone knows of any opportunities, feel free to contact me.

I should know whether I have the job or not by Monday or Tuesday next week.

Summarizing the PNWCA Conference Trip

This is part 1 of 2 – in this part, I’ll note everything that didn’t have anything to do with the conference directly, but instead had to do with my impressions during our travels and as we were at Oregon State University in Corvallis. In the second part (to come later), I’ll discuss the actual conference, including my own presentation.

We left directly after the staff meeting on Friday to drive four hours south to Corvallis, which, if I do say so myself, was a beautiful drive. I was able to make full use of my new Garmin StreetPilot C340 GPS, and it got us there perfectly (and would later get us back perfectly). The only sort of harrowing part of the trip down was having a semi two lanes over experience a tire blowout and having a part of the tire hit the car. I wasn’t really aware of it until I heard a somewhat sickening thump, then looked over to see the remainder of his rear tire shredding. I immediately pulled into the next rest stop and checked the car – no damage, and the same semi came limping in a bit after I did. We breathed a sigh of relief, took a brief stretch break, then continued south.

Crossing the Washington border is a little bit like being a very tempted fish going after a worm on a line – it keeps teasing you until you capture it. Case in point: once you hit exit 1 just north of the state line, they decide to split it into 1A, 1B, 1C, and 1D, just in case you weren’t already breathless with anticipation.

We got to Corvallis at roughly 3:30 after leaving at 11. The way we got on the Oregon State University campus wasn’t particularly impressive, since we had to go to their parking structure to park and pay for parking, then hightail it to Memorial Union (which, interestingly, has its own web site) for the pre-conference session – more on that later. The parking structure is in a very industrial-looking area with train tracks and a Naval Science building that’s very obviously old. However, if you walk two blocks to the Memorial Union, it turns into an absolutely beautiful campus, which is a very striking change between the two. Admittedly, the parking garage area looks like it’s new construction, but it’s still very confusing to make that transition.

After the pre-conference session, three of us went to check into the dorms, leaving the other two playing Frisbee. Our director wasn’t joining us until much, much later in the evening, so we had autonomy until then. Checking in went fairly well, though apparently OSU Conference Services doesn’t know how to check their locks – the original keys they gave me to my room didn’t work and they had to switch me to another room. This happened to one of our other tutors as well (one of the ones who was playing Frisbee, to be specific). After some discussion, we decided to run through both my presentation and the other presentation being given by tutors from Evergreen before dinner. Doing that was fairly extensive, with both run-throughs and feedback discussions about what modifications could be made to make the presentations better.

We went to dinner after dark (roughly 10PM, I believe), after deciding not to wait for our Director. We went to American Dream Pizza on Monroe, about five blocks or so from the dorms. Not the greatest pizza I’ve had, but definitely a fairly unique menu – we had the Tejano (BBQ sauce, Herb Chicken, Smoked Gouda, Cilantro, and Red Onion), which was a really interesting taste experience – I liked it. Another tutor and I went back to the dorms, and I rehearsed my presentation before falling asleep.

I got up at around 7AM, showered (and was fairly impressed by the shower itself – not the fact that it was dark like most collegiate shower stalls, but the actual shower), dressed, threw a tie on, then rehearsed my presentation in my head before we checked out and left for the conference itself.  We did finally find our director when we checked into the conference – she didn’t even get to Corvallis until 11:30 Friday, so we were somewhat glad we ate instead of waiting.
I’ll leave the whole conference summary for another post.

Before we left, we decided we wanted to eat as a group, so we solicited some suggestions from some of the local faculty and staff of OSU and settled on the idea of Thai food.  My interest was piqued, primarily because I’ve never actually had thai food before, but I was looking forward to it  We went to a place called Tarntip, down the block from American Dream.  We had some squid and some chicken skewers for appetizers (both good), and I had the Plah Laht Prig (#62 on the menu) as my main course – deep fried salmon with special sauce.  Not bad, but I’ve heard of better food.  The only drawback was that they don’t take credit cards, which caused a bit of a headache when it came time to pay (probably not the first time either).

We left at about 7:30 – my passenger and I both got back to Olympia at about 11, and I got home at roughly 11:30 or so.

It was the first time I’ve done prolonged driving, which actually wasn’t that bad. I did enjoy the trip and the conference experience – I just wish the conference might have been a bit longer so that we could get more exposure to some of those ideas.  More on that later.

Visited States

Apparently, I’ve only visited California, Florida, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, and Washington – I might have to do something about making that list longer this summer. Road trip, perhaps?

Summative Evaluations

Sometimes not having anything to write about can, in and of itself, be something to write about. However, that is not the case here.

This quarter, I’m continuing in my yearlong program at Evergreen, Student Originated Software. However, I am also taking an additional four-credit program (for a total of 20 credits) called Senior Seminar, which is intended to allow graduating seniors the chance to reflect upon their education and write a summative evaluation as a capstone to their transcript. The summative evaluation is an interesting beast, intended to provide an introduction to your collegiate life for those who are reviewing your transcript.

Evergreen transcripts are ordered most recent first, and each program that you are enrolled in has a program description, a self evaluation from the student, and a faculty evaluation of the student by the faculty member. Summative evaluations, while not required, are the very first pages that anyone sees before the rest of the evaluations. For me, this means that my summative evaluation will be on top, followed by the program description and faculty evaluation for Senior Seminar and the program description, my self evaluation, and my faculty evaluation for Student Originated Software. I have a very good idea of what I want that summative evaluation to do. I am graduating with a dual BS/BA in Computer Science and Writing (try saying that five times fast), but I have an insufficient number of credits to directly support my writing work. Thus, my summative eval, for me, will be almost a thesis-based essay explaining why writing has been an integral part of my life at Evergreen.

Now, the fun of being enrolled in Senior Seminar is that it’s really an opportunity to truly think about the work we have done, which means that I’ve had to drag out all those 2-inch binders that I have sitting around from all my classes throughout the year (a 2-inch binder per quarter enrolled, roughly – some smaller classes have smaller binders). Thus, my living room right now is stacked full of binders sitting there waiting for me to review them and look at them again as part of my preparation for writing my summative self evaluation. But the most crucial binder I have is not any one of those academic ones.

It’s the little, black, half-inch binder that holds my unofficial copies of my evaluations from my entire Evergreen academic career.

I’ll be writing more soon on what I think that summative evaluation looks like, and will probably even post some of the work I’ve been doing as preparation for writing that evaluation. Expect that, as June approaches, the posts here will be very reflective.

Enjoy.

Presenting at the PNWCA Conference

I have just been notified that I am a presenter at the 3rd Annual Regional Conference of the Pacific Northwest Writing Center Association being held at Oregon State University in Corvallis April 29th. There’s a free session on the 28th that I am likely to try to get to, since it pertains to my presentation topic. I’ll post a bit more later after I’ve finished doing what I was about to do before I wrote this (yeah, and I’m presenting with that kind of sentence structure? Seesh…)

Building Reputations Online

I’m currently a member of LinkedIn, a social networking service for professionals that targets executive-level professionals primarily but is open to anybody. I’m also (in passing) a member of OpenBC — a more internationally focused version of the LinkedIn concept. Between the two, my time is most definitely spent on LinkedIn, primarily because I have no real international connections. I’m also a member of Facebook and MySpace, though I don’t use either of those seriously either.

On the non-social networking side, I’m also a member of eBay. What do these five sites have in common? They all provide tools to network with other people (though eBay is really more about commercial transactions, it is still fundamentally networking). In addition, they also all provide a method to build an online reputation. eBay is the most obvious of these, since it provides its users with the ability to rate a transaction as positive, neutral, or negative – the more positive-rated transactions you have, the better off you are when you attempt to purchase or sell. The second most obvious one is LinkedIn, which, in a way, measures reputation by how many connections you maintain.

But is that really what LinkedIn connections mean? Not necessarily – in fact, in my case, that’s not really true at all. My strategy on LinkedIn is precisely this: connect with as many people as possible when I feel that having that connection would be beneficial to my work and future goals. Along the way, this has provided me with an opportunity to converse with several interesting people and to engage in conversations that were personally enriching. But none of this was based on my reputation – instead, it was based on my interest for their field of work and my desire to ask questions.

So what is an online reputation, really? I’m buidling one right now by typing this, and I will certainly be judged by my past posts, some of which are not always professional (this is a personal blog, after all). My tentative answer is this: your online reputation is definitely an extension of your real-world reputation, but only insofar as people know about your online work. I have a good reputation with a number of people offline who know nothing about my work online and cannot be influenced by it because of that, so the two are separate entities. This is certainly an open question, and one I’m considering as I utilize LinkedIn to grow a network.

Poetry Exercise of the Day

In case people are bored and want to do some writing, here’s the exercise I did during the Writing Center’s staff meeting this morning. Grab a literary journal (any one of sufficient length will suffice) and use the lines from random parts of that journal to create a new poem, called a cento. A cento is essentially a poem constructed using the words of other authors (our boss called it a “plagarized poem”, which is accurate enough, except that it’s cut from multiple authors). This is a very interesting exercise, and some of the other people that tried it came up with pretty good results. Another way to do sort of the same thing is to take a very old copy of a book, take a page out of that book, and randomly paint on the page so that some words are painted over and some aren’t. The words that aren’t construct a poem. It’s best not to read the page before you do this and just semi-randomly take out words. I suggest doing this with really old, run-down paperbacks – it reduces the shock of tearing pages out of books.

The Writing Center director is a poet, hence all the poetic exercises that she throws at us tutors from time to time!

Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine

It can be quite interesting to look at past work that you’ve done as a web designer, even when you don’t actually expect to run into that content.  I recently discovered the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (yeah, I know, where have I been all these years), which allows me to bring you the following nuggets of only partially-complete archive sites.  Some of this stuff does actually show more than just some broken links:

  • darkfusion.net
    This web site, which has had various incarnations in the past.  It started off as the domain for my web design company Dark Fusion Internet before I changed the name to naturalaxis.
  • naturalaxis.com
    I would be remiss not to link to my own company.
  • www.willworkfora.tv
    My really, really bad attempt at a SatireWire-like site – imitation being the best form of flattery.
  • www.insidelogic.net
    Way back when I was a teenager, I participated in a series of software companies, none of which were any good, but they did provide me some experience and a playground of sorts.  This was one of those sorts of projects.
  • students.overlake.org
    One of my bigger learning experiences in high school was creating and running a UNIX web server so that students could create web sites and host them on one of the school’s own servers.  The project died shortly after I graduated since nobody else there knew UNIX, but while it was up, people found it useful.
  • runicsys.tierranet.com
    Another one of those really old software company projects.  One of my first web page hosts that I had, but not the first.
  • runic.simplenet.com
    My first subdomain, hosted by what used to be Simple|Net (now Yahoo’s Web Hosting services).

My work has definitely evolved since I created some of these sites, but it’s still interesting to look back at the progression of the work.  The only exception to this was students.overlake.org, where not all the work was done by me (the later leaf logo was my work, and some other students did the main layout work for a couple of those incarnations).