This week started with internal group meeting on Monday – I almost forgot about it. Luckily, we all showed up, even Kristjana was able to join us with a bit of an excusable delay. Apparently, I was not the only one who didn’t work that much on our project during the Christmas break. But that is probably what a Christmas break is there for and I think we are already on track. It is interesting to see how everything depends on something else and if someone doesn’t not deliver something on time, it is impossible for the next one to keep going. Communication and reliability is key if you work on something like this and don’t have any clue what it is going to be about.
Scheduling every upcoming meeting until our trip already was a nice idea and it is now way easier to keep in mind what must be done when. And Kristjanas input on possible experts to talk to was also helpful. Unfortunately, she will be gone for the Philippines quite unexpected, but that is probably normal practice if you work in such an unpredictable field of studies.
Wednesday brought the first official SGT class. No expectations really as I think we did well by starting with regular meetings already way before. But classes are always a good way to get running and force yourself to be more continuous and committed. Seeing everyone again and getting to know the other mentors was nice. Especially getting to know all our different “skills” and thinking about ways to intertwine them was valuable for me. Happens often you forget that other people have a different background. Taking a look at the planned tasks and assignments during the course, I have to admit we already planned a lot of it. Expert interviews are on track, we have an expert lecture, communication plan is drafted, website is under construction and we already met with Kristjana three or four times? Seems okay so far. Convenient that the first assignment is “background-studies” as we planned to do this kind of research anyways during this week.
