“First day on the job, isn’t it?” - (No. 72)
He was very right.
I’m not sure what to expect for my first day in this position at the library, as a Vivero Fellow. Ostensibly, I’m to help people with digital media questions… and help them with any questions from digital courses at Grinnell…
It does appear that the mentoring space is rather tranquil right now. Rather, silent — very occupied, but not with people. We have so many mentors. I wonder where our mentees are. My friend came down here to check on his 3D printing and I accosted him and ensnared him into conversation. Well, the other way around. “Hey look, well so I’m working as a Vivero Digital Mentor. We’re all mentors here, and well if you need any help…”
I was not, however, prepared for the most foundational of questions.
“Well what do you guys really do?”
What do we do!
I’m not quite sure. Yet. I think the yet is helpful, so that when I submit this blog for review, my supervisors will not be affronted. I don’t really know what we do, yet. I’m supposed to be training, and there’s a training schedule already set up that we are to follow (this blog being part of that).
It would be wise, though, to figure out what we do. We provide mentoring services for all sorts of digital media.
“First day on the job, huh“. Yes, indeed.
One minor success: I did get the fellow to set up his website. Grinnell hosts this service for students– free websites for anyone who just signs up — and no one knows about it. Quite unfortunate. I managed to get the dude to fill out the form, and hopefully, he’ll have a website up eventually. A portfolio. I’m working on mine… as we speak.
Portfolios should be handy, especially for these CS-type peoples.
Well, I managed to publish this exact blog story on my other website, the one I set up for my actual Vivero position. You can see it here: https://about.davidnguyen.sites.grinnell.edu/blog-posts/.
A quick plug—the same one I gave the other guy. Grinnell has this free domain hosting service. You can just get a website. A free website, that you can customize and do stuff with, and you just gotta fill out a form. So I just have a davidnguyen.sites.grinnell.edu page, just for my greedy self. But you can as well. It works for a lot of things: your portfolio, your exhibits, your photography, your resume, a blog.
This is the website: https://sites.grinnell.edu/. Just click on Request Domain. And yeah, you can stop by the Vivero mentoring lab anytime in the evenings, from 7-9pm? I think1, and there should be mentors there to help you with digital stuff. It does appear to be quite mentee-less sometimes. If you come on Tuesdays and Thursdays to visit me, there are Apple PCs down here, and nice fluorescent lighting and you can study, just like my guy next to me learning Java while his 3D printer noisily clunks out plastic.
I don’t know my own schedule :)