Week 9

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 that come up at work. Especially with the large number of international students we get, there's a lot of connections to organizations such as the Malta Qualifications Recognition Information Centre (MQRIC), Identity Malta (in charge of residence permits), and departments from the Ministry of Education.
I do find myself a bit disappointed that there are certain processes that I cannot go through myself, because everything is locked behind using the eID feature of Maltese IDs and residence permits to sign up. This means that I can't get a grasp on the processes in order to explain them to callers, even if the answer would likely be very simple. I'm sure I've said this a few times before, but one thing I notice every day, is now lost you are without certainty in your understanding of systems. A lot of things work similarly to what I'm used to, they're not complicated or unexpectedly foreign. But I don't know that. There's so many gaps in understanding of things that give me uncertainty, which in turn really dampens my potential to be helpful, when they are common sense to everyone else.

Home

The weather has also been very pleasant. In Germany, an increase in sunshine and heat would always be considered nicer weather in my book, and it's still tricky to lose that way of thinking. Here though, this temperate weather is likely to be nicer than the sweltering heat I will be expecting in August. It's a shame I don't get to see much sun. My room at home exists in a state of perpetual darkness, and there doesn't seem to be any place nearby that I could just go to, to relax and enjoy the sun.

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