The Welcome Party

The pioneer post in this new catalog is fittingly dedicated to my arrival in Austria. The length of my stay, which will last until the middle of March, will be occupied by work as an intern for the Salzburg Global Seminar. I have only been here for a day, but the whirlwind has begun: there are a tremendous amount of people working for the Seminar, including my two officemates, Daniel and Adam. Daniel is a 27-year old masters student from Hamburg, who is working on a degree in political science; Adam is a 24-year old Missouri boy going after an MBA, and he is on the cusp of redheadedness, seen only in his traffic lane dash of facial hair. Both men are extremely pleasant and great to work with, have been quite helpful and thoroughly accomodating, and will unfortunately be in company for only a short while.

Today, I got the grand brushstrokes of my training session. As far as ISPs go, there is a fantastic amount of preparation that takes place revolving around each student who visits the Seminar. Most of my day was consumed by learning about the servers and databases that the Seminar features, and further, about how it is that I extract information from those manifests, crunch it down, and produce other documents (biographies and summaries, etc.) that will be used for the duration of the ISP sessions. I can see that there will be a fair amount of office work that will be requisite for all of the interesting matters to take place, so I've sort of resigned myself to getting as much done as quickly as possible so that I might enjoy the lectures and the like when they begin--this should be the first week of January. Until then, we are also preparing to host a winter festival, which will basically feature a huge amount of skiing, sleigh rides, and other more charming versions of the common Christmas in the bay area.

I get the impression that the non-session days here are much more loosely organized than my other jobs have been, which I love. In my limited experience, there is no boss hovering over me to make sure that my job is being completed; no one harasses me for things that they just assigned, nor do they offer constant correction and advice and reprimand; no one "checks in". Instead, I received an assignment yesterday, and I turned it in when I was done; two assignments today went the same way, and this style more properly befits my productivity. In general, the castle is very lovely, things are going smoothly (if quickly) and I am tremendously happy. And so ends the first and simple post.