Happy Chinese New Year!!
in Metis
We just had our first Lunch Outing as a Metis cohort.
Apparently past cohorts had a longer schedule and a longer official Lunch Break. When we really do have the entire afternoon for work on our projects, there’s a fuzzy boundary between Lunch and Work. A lot of feedback about ending the day at 6pm has prompted a change to a normally 9-5 shift with an hour for Lunch. The flip side of this is that a lot our Lunches become working Lunches with workshops and stuff squeezed in.
We had a long stretch of days where we really weren’t getting to work on our projects till later in the afternoon. Between presentations, workshops, reviews and what not, we were feeling the crunch and pressure. For most of us, this just shifts the burden to late evenings/nights.
Don’t get me wrong. These other things are all worthy things. We NEED the Career Services and related workshops Ashley provides. And we all benefit a lot from the investigation presentations from each other. The Quiz Review was also beneficial. I didn’t do too bad on the quiz. I got greater than 90%. I teased the instructors that they should have provided us histograms of the scores or other robust visualizations, etc. They did inform us that we didn’t get first place amongst the campuses this year. Seattle just barely scraped ahead of us! David and Alice enumerated about a dozen topics on the whiteboard. One by one, a student got up to discuss, present or teach that topic. This proved to be good review and reinforcement, especially for the one presenting. I definitely chickened out angling for easy topics or those where I had more background. I ended up with “general questions”.
Yesterday was our first day in quite a while with the afternoon purely devoted to personal project work. The instructors wander around to check in with folk during this time frame to assist, guide or cajole folk as needed.
But today was a voluntary choice for folk to eat away at time available for project work… all in good fun.
Dean has been pining for some good Chinese Dim Sum for quite a while. I thought they’d all gone after the bowling excursion. After the bowling a few of us split off to go home while the rest were planning on going out for dinner. But apparently they didn’t go to wherever Dean wanted. And, to be honest, even the choice of bowling was in opposition to Dean’s desire. The group voted between Bowling and Dim Sum and bowling eeked ahead.
Well, it’s Chinese New Year!! We have three Chinese: Alice; Dean; Derrick. So most of us joined.
Here’s a picture: 