Hey guys, it’s been a while I shared a daily blog and that’s because there hasn’t been anything I consider interesting to share. It’s also been because I’ve been busy working on getting a hostel to relocate to at my place of service. I talked about how stressful processing my National Service posting was, and now there’s a new struggle with finding a hostel. I’m currently staying at a friend’s hostel as I search for one for myself.
Anyways, that’s not what today’s blog is about. Today’s blog is about my first day at work. There’s a lot of background story you’ll be missing because I couldn’t catch you up on everything as they were happening last week, so this post might be long because of recap explanations.
So I reported late this morning around 8:30am and to my surprise, there was no one in our office. Even the professor I was placed under wasn’t in office yet. But I remembered he gave me an assistant’s number to call him when I reported today so that he’d start my training, so I did exactly that.
I didn’t know the guy coincidentally was passing right in-front of me when I dialed. So I walked up to him, we talked a bit and he gave me a run down of how things work and what I’ll be doing basically. It’s going to be a stressful couple of months!
Unfortunately for my first day, the medical students had an exam so as a teaching assistant under training, this seemed like a good start. The assistant was dying to use me. He walked me into the exam office where we picked the papers for the examination, and we met the medical students moving towards the exam venue by the time we came out.
Meanwhile back in the examination office, the exam officer was ranting about how almost all teaching assistants that were posted to the school were posted to the school of pharmacy and none were posted to the school of Biological sciences. I can understand why the school of pharmacy gets all the service personnel though, because a few months ago just before we wrote our final exam, the school of pharmacy of this school (where I’m doing my national service) sent notices to my school asking that students who wanted to be teaching assistants at their school submit their names and they(school of pharmacy) will sort out their postings for them to come there. And indeed, the students that submitted their names have been posted here. I told the exam officer this and he modded in agreement as he said they’d do the same next year. The exam officer is the guy in a pink shirt btw. Or whatever that color is:)
Back to the topic. We left the exam office in a car. I’m not sure whose it was, because it didn’t look like it belonged to the masters student who was driving us.
When we arrived at the exam venue, my mood flipped immediately I saw what was supposed to be the exam venue completely disorganized. I knew this meant work. A lot of work I wasn’t prepared for. White shirts don’t mix well with dusty work, and dusty work was exactly what this was going to be. But I’m the new guy, and I can’t have them thinking I’m lazy or something so I gave it my all even in my white shirt.
We called in some of the students to help with the arrangement because it was too much work for just 3 people to man.
After about half an hour of choking on dust, we were done. We arranged two different lecture halls, one with a 67 seat capacity and the other, a 93 seat capacity as there were 146 students going to take the exam.
They students were seated by 9:14 and the exam began at 9:15. It was a 2 hour paper so the exam ended at 11:15. I found it really funny when I spotted a couple of people talking during the exam and when they realized I was watching them, they’d act surprised and like I didn’t just see them asking the guy in front of them whether the answer to question 21 is B or D! Like please darling, I was you only a few months ago.
As part of my learning, I helped the experienced masters students invigilate the exam and I realized a few things. Like how difficult sharing mcq answer sheets to students actually is. I was in the 67 students hall, and even though I wasn’t the only one handling the sharing, my back hurt badly by the time I was done with two rows. And by the time the exam ended, my feet hurt like shit. I had it for today and lucky for me, the 2 hours elapsed very fast.
After the exam, I thought it was over, but there was more. You see, the exam papers were printed in 4 groups: A, B, C and D. The papers were the same for each group, just that they were mixed up so it’d make it hard for the students to copy. I’ve seen lecturers from my school employ this strategy too. Not that it ever stopped us. Lol jk (or not)
Anyways, after the exam, we had to sort the answer sheets according to the alphabets group so that marking would be easy. Oh don’t worry, it was only about 20 minutes of back pain long. I was glad that I had no hand in the marking of the scripts. At least for now.
My friend needed my help finding a pc to buy so I asked the guy in charge of my training if there was more he needed me to do, and when he said that was all, I was relieved! Then I asked if it was okay for me to leave because I had an errand to run and he said it was, so I went into town a laptop hunt. Since this post is about my workday and this oost is already too long, I’ll simply put in the pictures of the rest of the other things that happened today and you can create a narration out of it from your imagination:)
Oh and I feel I should mention the name of the guy training me because “the guy training me” is too long to keep repeating and it would be nice and convenient to just address him by his name for future references. His name is George.
Okay that was all for my work day today, have an awesome day!