2 Weeks of Wonderful Craziness . . .

Hi Everyone,

Sorry about my last 1 sentence post. I actually wrote 4 paragraphs and then my internet timed out and I lost everything . . . I have been in my new apartment for one week and don't yet have my own internet connection. An internet provider is actually coming in one hour, so, this should be the only technical difficulty that I encounter with the blog. Hopefully.

Speaking of technical difficulties, I have experienced some similar experiences at my new organization, the Campaign for Educational Equity. In fact, yesterday was the close of my first two weeks working at the Campaign for Educational Equity -- affiliated with Columbia Teachers College and Columbia Law School, we are a non-profit committed to promoting equity and excellence in public education and overcoming the gap in educational access and achievement between disadvantaged American students and their more advantaged peers. To me, this sounds like common sense education reform: of course, lower income and minority students should be provided the same level of education as their more affluent and white peers. Except, I have found that this is not the case in the real world; in fact, it is VERY difficult to implement this reform in school systems across the country.

It is so refreshing to work with staff who are whole-heartedly dedicated to literally opening doors to NYC students and students in the country at large. There are 3 full-time and 3 part-time employees, excluding me, and I enjoy working with each and every one of them.

As for the first 2 weeks, the first was very different than the second. The first, I spent a lot of time going to help sessions, filling out paperwork, and walking all over Columbia campus getting different ID cards and just figuring out where to go. As unbelievable as it sounds, it is really hard and time consuming to become an actual living, breathing person in the Columbia database. The second week I was able to work on more of my position's responsibilities and tasks. I sent out a daily news page on education litigation, policy, and advocacy to people in the education community across the country, worked on several projects for my directors, became more acquainted with the 2 websites that I will be eventually running, and became very acquainted with the oatmeal raisin cookies in the downstairs cafeteria :).

As for the technical difficulties, I think that this is part of my job. Because I am not a website designer or programmer, I have learned to have a very open and positive mind when something that I try to do on a website does not exactly go as planned. So, I will try to post this post again and see what happens . . .