Friday, July 18, 2008

The NASA Explorer School (NES) Workshop

If you’ve been so luck in the past to talk to me either the week before, week of, or week after either our annual week-long NES orientation workshop or content workshop, you know how I feel about workshops and how worked up I get. If you haven’t, consider yourself lucky! We do workshops every summer on various topics, and every summer I dread workshop week.

This week my team hosted a 4-day content workshop on NASA Mathematics. This has been my 3rd summer of workshops and I think it was our best. I have figured out that I like preparing for the workshop, I just don’t like the week of the workshop. I like ordering the supplies, reserving meeting rooms, requesting the photographer and buses, making the many corrections to the agenda, putting together the binder, etc.

We had 21 participants from NES schools all over the US. All of them were teachers that teach math in 7-12 grades. I discovered a new feature in Google Maps that allows you to mark points of interest on a map; so I decided to create a
map with the location of our participant’s schools. There are so many fun things you can do with Google Maps, I’m sure I haven’t found all of them yet. If their stock wasn’t in the $200 range, I would buy a lot of it.

All I can say about today is….. Thank God it’s Friday and the workshop is OVER!

_________________________

On the subject of work; some of you might be thinking “what does Katie do all day at NASA?” I really work for Penn State University for the Aerospace Education Services Project. There are 3 of us in my office of 46 that work for Penn State. Here is the quick and dirty description of what I do.

1) Manager the 2 Aerospace Education Specialists’ calendar. This really means I am the person that reviews requests and recommends we accept or reject the request.

2) I enter Aerospace Education Specialists’ travel reimbursements into the system for my 2 Specialists and all the Specialists at Kennedy Space Center, Goddard Space Flight Center and Stennis Space Center.

3) I enter calendar information into our NASA wide reporting system.

4) I am the backup for the main phone in our office.

5) I am one of two people that have training on how to deal with the very temperamental multi-function copy machine.

6) I order supplies

This sounds like a lot for one day’s worth of work, but most of this is sporadic and depends on calendar requests and travel forms. I have a lot of down time right now, which gives me plenty of time to write entries for my blog.

2 comments:

Corinne said...

So you have a tempermental MFD too, huh. I love ours when it eats my faxes. or when the ladies come over to 'remind me' that "um, don't know if anyone told you yet, but we're down to one ream of paper." REALLY?? you had to wait THAT long? goodness. Katie, I miss you!

ahhh, I remember your very first workshop week. You've come a long way since then and sounds like even if you don't like it, you're totally rocking it. You've got to show me that map thing. I could use that for sure!!

(by the way, in case you haven't guessed... i'm catching up on my Katie time tonight)

Corinne said...

Oh sweet! I just opened the map link from your page and you even have little guys and girls marking the spot where everyone is from. Awesome! seriously, you've got to show me how to do that. (i'm not busy on thurrrrrsday, hint-hint, wink-wink)