#and I’m also taking on supervisory and training responsibility for a grad student employee

[whentherewerebicycles]

okay I slept nine hours again last night but it’s fine I’m telling myself that I’m just aggressively resting up now in case the coming semester is super stressful. 11 business days and counting with no reply from the foundation (not even an out of office reply??) which is driving me insane because I have such a limited window of time to do all this fall semester planning if we do indeed move forward with recruiting a new cohort. I am loath to waste these last couple weeks of break revamping the whole syllabus and prepping training materials for a new hire if we’re just going to get a no from the foundation, but I also don’t want september to be a living hell for me if I don’t do the work now while I have the time. agh! I think I’m going to try to use syllabus replanning as a chance to concretely apply what I’m learning from this learning & development research book. that way I can tell myself I’m prepping for my new job by practicing with a real world example, and I can get at least a chunk of the initial work done for the program. okay okay. I can do this.

here’s what I’ve done so far this morning:

I rewrote my learning objectives based on the book’s advice to set aside separately defined abstract goals and focus instead on the practical real world skills that I’ve noticed students need to successfully complete their projects. then I subdivided those complex bundled skills into different sub-skills I’ll need to explicitly teach them + made notes on what type of instruction would be most effective for each one. I have started loosely using that list to plan specific seminars but I am leaving that a bit more open for now… that’s going to be more sustained work.

since we are probably going to have to start a couple weeks behind schedule, I think I’m going to require them to attend a paid one-day weekend retreat where we can do some intensive cohort bonding and lay a foundation for the semester in a more deliberate way. I mapped out a rough schedule for that event.

I downloaded some templates for Asana and Notion to experiment with. I’m going to need to use more structured project management tools this year since I’ll be supervising a grad student employee, so I need to teach myself how to use them + also create replicable templates tailored to our program.

to save time for faculty and to get better recs I think we’re going to use a recommendation form instead requiring a rec letter. I sketched out a very rough version of that form though again will put off actually creating it until we have more info.

I mapped out a calendar of deadlines for august and sent it to my boss, then nudged her to nudge the dean about reaching out to the foundation again today.

I am going to pause program work for a bit and get back to reading my L&D book. I have 70 pages left so I might try to finish it in the next hour or so, depending on how dense the last sections are. then I will take a break and do podcast editing for a bit, as I find it soothing. I think a good strategy for this week is to spend 2-3 focused hours each morning on course prep then firmly set that work aside. that way I can feel like I’m making solid progress but I’m not wholly giving over my last precious weeks of vacation time to work that might not even turn out to be necessary.