My first day

Just a quick few words about my first day at AIB...

K and I drove down to Bournemouth around 8:15 (about an hour and a half later than my usual train into London), I even had time to cook some oatmeal for breakfast. I was due at the university at 9:30. It only took us about 50 minutes to drive down there. Traffic wasn't too bad.

As usual, when starting a new job, there's a bit of thumb-twiddling. I got brought in on a morning meeting with some of the first year students wherein the course leader introduced me. Then I had a bit of a tour around with one of the other Technician Demonstrators, seeing how things work, meeting students and other faculty, etc. Then I met up with the course leader and we had a bit of a "chat". He just wanted to get to know me and try to get a feel for how my skills can be used. He's really happy to get a Tech. Dem. that has film production experience so I can better help the students with issues related to location shooting, etc. However, it's going to be rather quiet at the uni until October, when the fall semester starts. So, during the summer, I'll likely be working on creating an internal website to disseminate information to the film production students. After our "chat", we had lunch with the cinematography instructor to talk about how I might be able to take some of the burden off of his shoulders. The course leader's idea is to have him teach me all of the technical details of the camera equipment, especially how it should be handled, so that I can specialize in that aspect. Then he can focus more on teaching the students about cinematography. This all sounds pretty good to me!

The rest of the day was pretty much all thumb-twiddling. The Technician Demonstrator room is quite small and cramped right now, so I don't have anywhere to be at the moment. They are enlarging the room this summer and then revamping the layout inside. Until that is done, they have a desk for me in the staff room, though no computer, so there's not much I can do there. It'll get going soon enough. We have plenty of time. I just have trouble if I feel idle, so I hope I get some legitimate tasks sooner rather than later.

I'm excited about the job though. It's going to be very fascinating work.