I can’t think about what I’ve done or else it will destroy me. It’s too overwhelming. There are too many pieces to it. It seems insane—or at least desperate. Who would leave all their friends and their work network to go somewhere where you only know a handful of people to do a job you’ve never done before? (“This is a story you’re telling yourself,” says Brené Brown in my head.) And there’s still so much left to do to get settled, none of it particularly difficult, just a lot of banal To Dos like finding a dentist and a dog groomer. A pile of trivial tasks. Death by a thousand errands.
I was thinking about this (or trying not to think about this) today when picking a healthcare plan. I finally got temporary access to CMU’s Workday system (weirdly, a company that I was talking to before taking the CMU position (they rejected me)) and filled out my HR paperwork this morning, which included deciding on a healthcare plan. Of course, living in America, this is a decision that can be life or death or bankruptcy. I closed my eyes and picked one in the middle and hoped for the best.
This morning, I sat in while faculty and staff put together the MHCI Capstone Project teams. The Capstone Project is a two-semester course where teams of Masters students work with real companies on real projects. There’s a kind of dark art of putting the teams together, to make sure students get the projects they like, while balancing for skills and personalities. The staff has been doing this for years and it ran pretty smoothly. One thing that worried me about the big class sizes in HCII was that students wouldn’t be known very well. That doesn’t seem to be the case, as each student was discussed pretty thoroughly.
I got the key to my office (although not the security to get into the building) today. It looks like this right now:
I’m pretty sure Ph.D. students sleep on this couch. And I don’t even want to know what else. I need to do some redecorating.
I’ve also started to get ads like this:
So three days into this gig, the internet is on to me.
"Who would leave all their friends and their work network to go somewhere where you only know a handful of people to do a job you’ve never done before?"
Every single immigrant. You're not alone :)