Month: March 2017

Author: Sasha Mayn

It is no secret to anyone who has spent any amount of time at Carleton that life here is busy. Classes, workstudy, sports, rehearsals, volunteering, research and occasional sleep combine in elaborate ways which can make anyone dizzy and make planning ahead and keeping track of all the commitments almost impossible. I remember thinking when I was applying to be a DHA last year: “This job is so awesome! I get to schedule my own hours – that means I can just work on the projects whenever I have free time”. I was only partially right. The job is indeed awesome, except there is no free time. As weeks go by, the term gradually turns into an avaricious time-sucking wormhole – and finding time to work becomes a struggle, sometimes (almost) making me wish I had a set schedule.

My job as a DHA made me realize how inept I am at organizing my time. I can finally feel that I’m slowly but steadily getting better. Here’s what I’ve learned (by many a trial and many an error):

• Having a planner is very useful and marking the hours I expect to have to work on DH projects at the beginning of each week definitely helps.
• Even though there are no official hours, it’s good to set hours for myself as if there were, and adhere to the schedule as much as possible – if there’s a conflict in my schedule for that week, I can deviate from it.
• Project logs are great! Better still if they are detailed and well-written. It has happened to me many times that I would jot down a quick note to myself about what I still need to do for a project or think that it’s so obvious that writing anything down is completely unnecessary. Unsurprisingly, next time I sat down to work on the project I’d be totally lost because I would no longer remember my own thought process. So yes, write down as much as possible.
• Try not to put off until tomorrow what can be done today. Sounds simple but is surprisingly effective.

In this way my work as a DHA has inspired me to start an uphill battle with absent-mindedness and procrastination. It will be a long and tough one. But I have hope.

Author: Elizabeth Budd

As I near the end of my second term as a DHA, it is a good time to reflect on what I’ve learned from this experience so far. Since starting in September, I have learned, been exposed to, and experimented with a number of digital tools. Although the major tool I have been using in my work is ArcGIS, being part of the DHA team and Team Workhouse means that I learn more every week from the work other team members have been doing. However, perhaps more importantly than learning digital tools, I have learned the importance of communication and asking questions.

For teams like the DHAs and Team Workhouse, communication is crucial. Just like the game objects in Bard’s Unity project that needed to share information in order to function, people on teams also need to share information in order to function smoothly. Uncertainty about who is doing what is not efficient or productive for teams. A particularly important part of communication is asking questions. While I have learned a lot about digital tools these last two terms, I know that there is a lot that I still don’t know. While sometimes it can be productive to struggle through uncertainty to figure something out, other times the process can be greatly improved by a quick meeting or email exchange.

One example of this was when I was helping to migrate our website to a new page (you can see our current website here!). In particular, I was struggling with moving media (especially videos) over to the new site. I spent time looking through Reason’s documentation and trying to figure it out myself, but made very little progress on my problem. Finally, I talked to Doug Bratland, Web Content Specialist, part of Carleton’s Web Services Group. He was incredibly helpful and in just a half hour was able to fix the problems I had been working on. Not only did he solve the problems I was having, but he also took time to explain why I had been running into problems and make sure that I understood what he did to solve them. I came away from that meeting with not just solutions to the website issues, but also a deeper understanding of how Reason CMS works. If I had not asked for help and questions about the problems I had with the website, not only would it have taken much longer to fix, but I wouldn’t have learned as much about how it works. Although just one example from my two terms as a DHA, it nevertheless illustrates the importance of asking questions about things I don’t know. And although I have learned a lot about digital tools in the past two terms, there is still a lot I don’t know. So, I will need to keep asking questions.