Confessions of a New Employee

Posted November 4, 2013 by Sarah Barton

I started my new job last week, and have already encountered a handful of situations where I thought “I learned about this in one of my classes.” It has been encouraging to have that baseline knowledge, yet strange to be learning how to apply it in real life with real sources and real implications. I haven’t done anything of consequence yet – just some snooping around in a few databases and reading some internal instructional documents – but I feel like I’ve already learned a lot. GSLIS has given me a general knowledge foundation, and now my job will teach me the specifics.

Starting a new job is always a challenge, whether it be adjusting to a new schedule, sitting through HR information sessions, interacting with new coworkers, learning new systems, having questions but not knowing who to ask, feeling anxious about all there is to learn, or figuring out appropriate arrival and departure times (I’m still a bit flummoxed by that one). Who knows how long it will be until I hit my stride and become the fully functional research analyst that I am (hopefully) destined to be, but for now it’s quite clear that I have a lot to learn. This learning period will likely be somewhat frustrating, as I want to know everything now, so I need to focus on managing my expectations. I have high expectations for myself, but I can’t allow those to interfere with learning the basics of this job. I’m hoping that after a few weeks of learning and practice I will have the basics down and can let my expectations run wild.

One of those expectations is for how awesomely decorated my cubicle will be. If that’s not something to look forward to, I don’t know what is!