Headhunted

Well, not exactly. But I was offered a job today, albeit a very small university related one. This is something I've always wished would happen to me- I don't mind hard work but I hate applying for things. This is why I was unemployed for all but 7 weeks of the year before I came to LSE...
I'm not actually entirely sure what the job involves. Basically, I sent the Environmental Co-ordinator a copy of the summary I made of our group's discussion at yesterday's meeting, after one of the group suggested I forwarded it to her, and I got back an email saying

Thanks [my name], you are very effective.

Would you consider doing some paid work for me on sustainability
issues at LSE?
If so I would need a CV and we could meet to discuss the area
I have in mind.
How are your studies going?
Best wishes [her
name]

I'd like to think the combination of my summary and the leaflets and poster I showed her yesterday wowed her to the extent that she felt moved to make me this offer- but I suspect it's actually that she's been looking for people and thinks, since I've been putting in quite a bit of effort, that I might be interested in taking on some kind of more official work. And of course, she's not saying that I can have the job as soon as I say the word: just that I could be considered for it (I think). But still, I'm savouring the experience of being made a request- such a change from trying to persuade employers that they want me...

I may not actually take it up- it depends on what the time commitment is and what kind of work it is. I said this in my reply, and she said they'd fit it in round my studies, but I think she wants to wait to meet face to face to talk about what's involved. As well as the time factor, I'll see whether it's something I feel capable of- though I won't deny I have strengths, my skill set also has its fair share of blind spots!

I started the day pretty early- getting in to college at 8. This was because when CMCC and the others came along to the lockers after yesterday's event, he was talking about needing some help mounting the photos for the exhibition* this morning, and I said I could help till ten, and he said he was going to start at 8. But, and you may have guessed this was coming, he wasn't there at 8. He didn't actually arrive till 9- when he explained that he hadn't come earlier because 'reception'**, where the photos were being looked after, didn't open till then. Why he didn't take that into account yesterday, I'm not sure... but never mind. I actually mounted the photos by myself as he had a meeting he had to dash off to, and, purely due to the way they happened to be ordered, I got the satisfaction of mounting all of mine as well as many others. I didn't get it finished though. And I didn't do as nice a job as I could have wished- the card was very thick (the wrong type, really), and I didn't have my big scissors but was borrowing a little pair, and so the edges of the pieces I cut came out rather scrappy. And I didn't have time, or the tools, to really do it properly and make sure I was marking out proper rectangles with right angles as well as straight edges. I handed over to SC2 who turned up at 10- and left her my new propelling pencil (bought to replace one that broke), my rubber and my glue. So, having spent last week constantly regretting not having a pencil, I am in the same situation once again.

We got the tests from yesterday back. I hadn't done as well as I thought; this was partly due to forgetting to consider BIDMAS*** (I can't believe I was so stupid) on a couple of questions, and the answers for those being wrong meaning that my answers for some of the others were automatically wrong as well, but also due to a few points I hadn't quite understood, so it was usefull.

We then had some more time to work on the group project. But we spent about half an hour trying to remember what the functions and so on we wrote last time did... To combat this, and also (though I didn't mention it) the fact that one group member is constantly not up to speed on what we're doing and keeps asking questions about quite basic while we're trying to concentrate and work things out, and seemed to need the same things explaining today that he did last week, I volunteered at the end of the session to go through all the functions and write out what they did and what we'd done- hopefully that group member can go away and work it all out in his own time, and will only need the new stuff explaining next time... -but the main thing is that we'll be able to refer to it if we forget what things are when we come back to it.

We seem to have got over the difficulty from last week- and even wrote a function to do something we couldn't see how to do last time (we'd done it kind of manually so had technically answered the question, but thought it would be better to write a function to do it from the point of view of getting marks). But when I was writing it all up, I used that function again to get a value to write down, and it now seems not to be working as well as we thought. So that's a problem.

We only had an hour long computer class today because there was the Staff Student Liaison Committee. It was pretty much compulsory, and we all got to say what were the problems (and good points) with each of the courses- there were just two lecturers and each of them went out when we discussed their course so we were able to be brutally honest! I mentioned that it would be good if the Principles and Methods lecturer would do some examples not from the homeworks when going through the notes- which would give us a chance to see how to do the questions and then try some ourselves, rather than learning how to do them only when he goes through the homework solutions- when he generally gets through all the questions in the same session so there's no chance to go away and have a go at the others. Apparently everyone else had been thinking the same thing... There were a lot more criticisms of various kinds for that course; the consensus seems to be that he can't teach (though he's apparently a lovely person)... To be fair, there were also criticisms for most of the other courses, just not so many. Another point I raised, about both that course and Time Series, is that we're being taught how to calculate things but not why we want to, or how to use what we've calculated in interpretation. After all, I could probably teach myself to do the calculations from a book- it was the interpretation in particular that I hoped to gain from coming to university.

After the discussion, there were free sandwiches, which were pretty nice, and juice.

We had Principles and Methods this afternoon, and I was able to note some of the features that make him a bad teacher. There was the mumbling, the unfinished sentences, the walking about thinking what to do next, the way he always does the examples as he goes along instead of working them out before the lecture and copying what he's written, the time he spends deciding which homework question to go over... if he prepared better and eliminated the last three points, there'd easily be enough time to fit in examples (the point has been made that there's only so much time to fit all the material in). Today we did at least finish five minutes early, which I was glad of, because it meant I could go to the Living Wage Campaign demonstration, which I thought I'd have to miss: it started at 4.45 and my lecture didn't in theory finish till 4.55. They wanted as many people as possible to stand with posters in the Old Theatre- where the staff attending the School Council would have to pass through- because they were submitting a document to the Council about the treatment and low wages of LSE's cleaners, and the council was going to decide whether or not to improve conditions for them- so the Living Wage Campaign wanted to show them how many LSE students (and staff?) felt strongly about it.

Then in the evening there was the next Climate Change Awareness Week event- which I managed to get the right time for this time! There was a Green MEP and a Labour MP, both strongly in favour of the government taking measures to combat climate change, and they both had some very interesting things to say. And for once (maybe because there were only 20 or so audience members), I actually had both the courage and the inspiration to ask a question, near the end of the question session- not a very good one but not too bad either: "Public transport is a real option in towns and cities, but in many rural areas currently you practically have to have a car. Do you think that as part of a climate change strategy we might get new railways, or at least more buses?" Technically they didn't answer the question, as they didn't mention railways and talked about how more buses might posssibly be brought about if the government was inclined to do so, rather than whether it was likely to happen or not- but I didn't mind too much as they said some interesting things!

*Over Climate Change Awareness Week there's an Environmental Photo Exhibition in the Quad- with quite a loose definition of 'environmental'. There's a silent auction so people can bid for pictures they like. I submitted five- drawn from a shortlist of 80- drawn from my collection of 8000...

**Not quite sure what or where that is

***BIDMAS: Brackets, Indices, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction. When you have a mathematical expression written down, such as 2 + 3 ^ 4, BIDMAS tells you what order to do it in. Here, there are no brackets so the first thing is Indices: we calculate 3 ^ 4, which is 81; there is no division or multiplication so we go to addition and add two to give 83. We don't do 5 ^ 4 = 625. If we wanted that, we'd write (2 + 3) ^ 4- now we do have brackets, so we do them first, ie 2 + 3 = 5, then take the indices, 5 ^ 4 = 625