A Different Type of Training

A long day today including a meeting, a lecture and some non TSC training. First up the lecture and whilst I wouldn't usually mention a lecture, this one was particularly useful for a change and pretty much told us what we were actually meant to be doing for our assignment. I hadn't been giving it much thought until now - mainly because my dissertation has been taking up pretty much all of my time.

On the subject of dissertations, it was time for my final dissertation meeting. The big deadline is on Wednesday and so I have given him a draft copy of it to look at. I hope to have it all finished on Monday so that I can tidy everything up and get it printed on Tuesday. Thankfully he seemed to think it was very good and apart from a couple of sections towards the end that need some work on them - mainly because I wrote them at silly o'clock in the morning and thus they make very little sense.

The rest of the afternoon was taken up with peer mentor training. I'm still not sure if TSC counts towards my graduate award or not and peer mentoring is something I think I would be pretty good at. It is only the second year it has been available in our department and I think I know enough about the city and the university now to offer some assistance. Thinking about it, I was considering doing it last year and the amount I know now compared to then makes me feel like I knew nothing in my second year. It was a three hour session where we were basically doing some team work and asked to think about how we dealt with and / or would have dealt with certain situations. None of it was taught so much as us answering our own questions which was nice in a way but makes me slightly concerned about really big topics like students who have really big problems. The gist I got however was that if we thought something was too big to handle then we referred them to the many different services available in the university who have been trained to deal with those situations. I'm sure it won't come to that but my motto in life is hope for the best but prepare for the worst.