Week 2

On Wednesday, I got my pc set up, together with email and Classter access.

Work

Classter has already come in handy many times, letting me check up on students, verify data and find contact information. For full-time certificates, this means I can now help students that neglected to properly fill out the consent form when having a certificate picked up by a third party -- which happens a lot. Verifying personal information, calling the student in question at work, and having them send me a filled out form to be printed out lets me handle a good percentage of cases I had to pass to someone else previously. For part-time and old courses, I can now actually help students remember when they did a course with us and what it was called, so I know where to start looking for the certificate they are looking to pick up.

I've also been sent an overview of the hundreds of certificates from last graduation that haven't been picked up, and tasked with updating it to the current status so that new reminders can be sent out. This meant double-checking our signature sheet of collected certificates, as well as going through the certificates themselves. In the process I found quite a few discrepancies, all of which the officer I mentioned them to ended up following up on. I also now have an actually well-rounded overview of these certificates and what's where, to the point where I think I'm more up-to-date than my mentor. I'm also keeping the sheet updated constantly now. Handing out and charging for reprints is also going well and being done and documented by me. With phone calls, I can now at least accurately get some basic information before I have someone else finish off helping the caller.

One new thing I've been doing is handling requests for certificates to be sent by post. Sometimes this is to a private address, sometimes to the MCAST Campus on Gozo.

Free-time

While I don't do much after getting home from work during the week, I am friendly with the people from my room, and the hostel in general. The atmosphere and people are really great, and I find myself chatting with the hostess as well.
On one evening we ordered food from a great local takeout place. They have a small selection of fancy seafood burgers, and we'd gotten food from them before as pick-up. This may not sound very notable, but it's not an experience I will forget. After a delivery driver continuously couldn't the hostel, which is 5 minutes away from the shop and has a giant red marquise with the house number on it, delivering me the wrong burger 1 hour later, me convincing the store for another 20 minutes that it was wrong, and finally arranging for me to just walk over and pick up the correct one, it only took about 2 and a half hours for me to finally eat. And it turns out that I liked the wrong burger, which I got to keep, more than the one I actually ordered. Anyway.

While I did get invited to a few trips, including on the weekend, I still didn't feel much like going on full-day excursions. The weather was still nice during the week, then grey during the weekend, so I once again mostly stayed inside. It was one evening walk, that turned out to be memorable. With the winds reaching new heights, I spent a lot of time trying (failing) to capture waves in the dark. The waves would crash against the rocks far below so violently, that water sprayed up all the way to the sidewalk. I got drenched by one. The tragedy of the situation is, that I had stopped a recording moments before that fateful moment; so unfortunately it could not be captured on camera.

Luckily, with it being warm enough for the rest of the way home to be just kind of unpleasant, I still considered the walk a success. The excitement far outweighs the disaster of the situation.