Recently I had a very rough day—the single hardest day of my Fellowship thus far. The campus has hosted an entomology conference the past 3 day. The first day there was so much hectic preparation that I just felt useless. When it is so busy, no one wants to find work for the exchange student (who not only does not speak the language perfectly but also pragmatically does not know all the logistics of and buildings on campus). The situation was not the fault of anyone but I still found it very hard to keep things in perspective. I felt very limited in my abilities the whole day. The university students ran the behind-the-scenes logistics and setup of basically the entire conference so one of our major duties was being there to answer any questions the conference attendees had. Again, I was limited for three reasons. Firstly, I had not been there for the planning of the conference so I did not know the plans and sequence of events without asking someone else. Secondly, many times I did not know the answer to a question simply because it was not my home university and I do not know where every single thing is located. Thirdly, even though my Spanish has improved greatly, at times I did not understand exactly what an attendee would ask me. All in all, the day was very hard for me. Thankfully, the following 2 days of the conference went better. I guess I needed that one day to figure out the flow of things.
1 Comment
Robin
7/18/2017 05:54:45 pm
Those days are challenging. I'm sure that everyone realized that you were more than willing to do your part wherever you could help. Perhaps you were useful in ways that you're not even aware of!
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Ben JohnsonI am a junior at Rice University majoring in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and minoring in Environmental Studies Archives
June 2017
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