First Day At School

First Day at the School. Patricia came early to pick me up, and we took a drive down to 373 Sussex, 111 Sussex and Asticou Centre (Gatineau, Quebec) - places where I would also have assignments/ courses - before heading to 257 Slater. Right into an evacuated crowd from an early morning fire. What a welcome.

Once we reached 257 Slater, we met the entire Global Learning Division (GLD) team, sans Louise. Over the next 2 hours, we had self-introductions; a walk through of the School's org structure; located my assignments within that structure; and discussed some similarities/differences with the College. What surprised me was that the GLD members themselves found Patricia's 'tour' of the School's structure enlightening for (she facilitated the sharing in the form of a pop quiz, which left quite a few at the table stumped), and discovered things about each other's work that they didn't know about. They admitted that it probably had to do with the size of the School (over 800 people), as well as the fact that people change portfolios and things get shifted around frequently.

I got a tour of the office too, meeting the rest of the people on Level 5 (ha, same level as back home). These are people from the Strategic Change and International Cooperation teams. In fact, my closest cubemates, Doug and Peter, are leading a project with China. Peter, in particular, was reading printed copies of Ethos articles when we popped by to say hello :-)

Patricia and Katrina took me out to lunch @ Paradiso, during which I realised that they don't have a culture of eating together. Perhaps because of the workload and the active nature of international relations-oriented work, people pretty much eat at their desks. So they thought the office parties and pig-outs that we have back home are quite awesome.

The office system is not altogether unfamiliar. Everyone has a desktop (but also a Blackberry - apparently I'm getting one too), with a wireless keyboard and mouse. They have common and personal network drives like us, and everything's stored there. So this morning, when the server was down, everyone was exasperated (sounds famliliar?). I got my staff/security pass done at 373 Sussex within 10min (including what I think is a rather nice photo :-) ), and had a short tour of that campus too. We ended the day meeting Christian (my previous liaison point) in Quebec for drinks, and had an interesting time discussing the question of "What is a Singaporean?" I told them it was an issue that would keep me up for the next few nights :-p

Much more reading tonight. Team meetings start tomorrow, for the Leadership Across Borders (LAB) programme, which we are travelling to Toronto for this weekend, and Montebello late next week...