Erasmus Malta 2022

Tuesday Tuesday afternoon, I left work early for another trip to the airport. This time, I'd be picking up my aunt and delivering her safely to her flat in Valletta. The pick-up went well, despite my bus having a 25 minute delay; and once we managed to correctly figure out the location of her apartment, that went well too. It was a lovely little place, with air-conditioning and a sunroof. The roof especially turned out to be an incredible feature. The street the apartment was on was only one off from the end of the city, close to the water, so the view from the top did not suffer any obstructions. Sure, you couldn't see far into Valletta itself, as the buildings rose one higher than the other, but you could see the flatter parts of the island in the distance, the ocean, and across to Sliema. After dropping off my aunt's luggage, we then started a short trek through the city. We were hunting for a restaurant, if which there were many, but hopefully a little outside the busy ...

Work A batch of certificates from a course done on Gozo Campus arrived. As most of the students in question would want to pick it up from there, I kept a hold on the certificates and waited for the requests to come in.  The true work this week however, is with stipends office. As stipends/student maintenance grants are a government scheme run on a different system, I don't have any access to that information. Furthermore, stipends office isn't technically my area of work; I've only learnt the answer for a common problem or two, and to redirect to my coworker. Over the weekend however, the maintenance grants department at the Ministry for Education got busy. They sent out a large wave of letters regarding overpayments that need to be paid back by students who either failed or discontinued their studies. Phone calls and in person-visits this week were dominated by angry students who refused to understand and/or accept the situation. And as my coworker got sick fairly early on...

  In lieu of repeating myself about the routine at work, this week I will be drawing from my backlog of cat pictures. The upcoming weeks will be busy for me, as my boyfriend and then my aunt will be visiting me for a while.  I pass the sign on the left on my way to get groceries. There's a park nearby, which I guess I should consider as an option for weekend sun-times.

Work Unfortunately, I've reached the point where not much can be said about work. This week I sent out a lot of certificates to private addresses, as well as Gozo Campus. It is also no surprise that a lot of the recent graduates have come in to pick up their certificates, since they're either Undergraduate or Bachelor degrees. These people have been mostly nice, though displeased at whichever reason it was that stopped them from attending their graduation. Inquiries about the graduation photography were also common this week. Other than that it's mostly phone calls and e-mails that require general advice; sometimes they're all from the same person, who insists that they've definitely been at our office multiple times for weeks, and no one was ever there. Overall I'm very happy with the understanding I've gained of the way MCAST, the general Maltese education system and the surrounding subjects work, many of which I've gained by reading up on the things t...

Work Graduation was in full swing this week, with a lot of people making last-minute calls to clarify things. Many people realized the day before the event, that they didn't know how long it lasted or where to go on Campus. There's also one specific case that had been discussed back and forth for a while, that finally got resolved just the day before, and I was very glad to see the people involved happy. In a funny coincidence, when I returned from my break on Thursday (the day of), and my mentor decided to tune into the livestream of the graduation, the exact person I'd been in so much contact with was just called upon stage! That was genuinely pleasant to see, and made me very happy. It was nice to get to see the event, after witnessing the preparation from the sidelines for the whole month. It also meant that the office was very empty, and actually completely empty around the time I left. While some people still came in until shortly before I left, to use some of the mac...