Sunday, August 26, 2012

Settling in

It's been about a month since I started work at the Character Education Partnership (CEP) and I'm gradually starting to realize how long it takes to truly understand an organization's mission and workplace culture. My past work experiences have been short-term internships with low stakes and few major responsibilities. At CEP, I've felt genuinely included at almost every step of the organization's process. The office is currently occupied with developing an "elevator pitch" to briefly and succinctly describe our mission and I'm surprised at how challenging I've found it. I'm finding that my professional responsibilities are also finally shifting from quick, one-off tasks to more long-term, sustainable projects that I oversee, at least in part.

On a different note, I've started to fully appreciate that CEP is a workplace that has the promotion of certain values in schools as its primary mission. I've found this to be a fascinating opportunity to identify specifically why this mission is important to me and applicable to my larger sense of what I want to accomplish in my career, as well as what my values are.

In a way, the process of defining my role within the organization has functioned on both concrete and abstract levels: both understanding what I am best-equipped to do (and what I want to do) and what the reasons are for wanting to do it.

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