My First Week at Work

Ok, time to talk business.

Since you have invested in reading this blog, I’ll just be straight up with you about the content. The main reason I am in New Zealand for these three months is to work at the Royal Society of New Zealand. Here’s the spiel I gave people who asked what I was going to be doing before I got here:

“The Royal Society of New Zealand is a non-governmental organization and their external affairs sector, with which I will be working as a policy intern, provides expert advice on science, technologies, and the humanities to members of the New Zealand legislature so that they can make informed policy decisions on these topics.”

I slowly watched people’s eyes glaze over as I droned on about this, and frankly, I think I would too if I heard it from someone. However, I swear there’s a lot more to the job! … all which will be revealed to you within the next eleven weeks as I take on projects at the office, all with the goal of hopefully influencing policy in one way or another. I am sure I will, but my contributions might be less obvious than the more-apparent members of parliament.

But enough of that! Part of the fun is that this is the first time I will have ever worked in an office! So that, of course, comes with so much fun awkwardness and unfamiliarity to provide at least eleven weeks of entertainment to an outside viewer. Here’s how my first day of work on Monday went down.

First of all, it was pouring. And I mean POURING. The streets of Wellington were flooding. Luckily, most of the twenty-five minute walk to work through the downtown and up to a small suburb of the city called Thorndon is sheltered under storefront overhang, but the five minutes that I had to walk without any overhead protection was enough to soak me through to my underwear. So I arrive at the office, drenched, and politely tell the receptionist, “I’m Devon Jackson, I’ll be interning with the Society for the next twelve weeks.” [no answer] “Sorry that I brought the Great Lakes with me.” [polite laugh] “Is there a washroom I can clean up in?” [Devon proceeds to wring out his socks] Luckily, I was wearing black pants so I didn’t look too wet… only my spirit.

Things perked up though, as I was shown around the beautifully modern and earthquake-proofed building that now houses the offices of the Royal Society of New Zealand. My boss showed me around and introduced me to everyone on all three floors of the office, then I went to my desk and started up my computer as I was assisted in connecting to the network. So that let to FUN computer times. Here are three slightly embarrassing things that occurred with the start-up of my computer:

1. My log-in screen picture is of Meryl Streep. So much for letting the cat out of the bag subtly.
2. My DVD player on the computer starts up automatically and blasts the end credits of Arrested Development, which my sister and I had been watching the night before, throughout the entire floor. 
3. While connecting to the network, the three coworkers of mine huddled around my computer see that my default computer name isn’t something standard like “Devon Jackson’s PC” or “My Computer,” but rather (in all caps) “TALLULAH.” Poor Tallulah.

After all that, I was basically debriefed on what everyone on the policy team does and then I got started on my first project. The Society is writing an “emerging issues” paper on promising green technologies, so I produced a literature review… basically sifting through hundreds of academic journal articles, figuring out which ones would best help answer the scope of the paper. And boy does this type of literature review take time. I won’t go into detail on the intricacies of literature review-making, but all I can say is that I was concurrently thorough and concise. It’s a difficult task. Anyway, I worked on that all week. Literally, all week. It was a little tedious, but interesting at the same time. And you sort of find out ways to make the work interesting/bearable. Here are my top three tips for making an academic journal article compilation bearable:

1. Drink a cup of tea as you sift through journals on green technologies and renewable energy policies and marginal abatement cost curves and societal challenges to technology uptake and so on and so forth. Reward yourself with a sip everyone once in a while. (Banana chips also work as a reward)
2. If you come across something that you don’t know, look it up! Wikipedia is a great tool for base-learning, and learning is fun! A lot of stuff is really cool and we just don’t know that it is cool because, well, we’re oblivious to stuff’s existence! (Ok, that last sentence was a stretch but I’m tired)

That’s it, actually. Tea and Wikipedia.

I’ll comment more on workplace dynamic and the actual building and Wellington itself later… but for now I must get some sleep because tomorrow we are rising early to visit the Academy-Award winning Weta Workshop! I feel like I’ve been there already from the special features on the Lord of the Rings DVDs, but I’ll gladly visit in person.

Here’s a reward for reaching the end of this very verbose post. Surprise: it’s a picture of me in front of my work (the weekend before work started though, I didn’t go in a t-shirt and jeans).

SURPRISE! Here's another one of me in front of a sign of a street we stayed on. There are actually a lot of Devon Streets in New Zealand; I've had a large influence on the country already.