This is my second co-op, and I've had experience working in an office before, so I didn't need to adjust too much to settle in here. There are a lot more meetings here than any of my previous jobs, and sometimes I do feel like I contribute nothing to the meeting by being there, like with this week's HM10 review, where I didn't really have anything to add, since I didn't do any work on organizing the meeting. For the most part though, I'm fine with the meetings.

I really like how team-oriented this organization is, especially with the cross-department teams. In my experience, people tend to take other departments for granted, and I think it is a great idea to get involved with other departments to get an idea of how well they'd be able to meet the needs of a project, rather than getting the entire project planned out only to find out one of the departments would not be able to meet the goals.

I don't feel the meetings negatively affect my performance here. I get the impression I have a bit more downtime than the other co-ops, simply by virtue of being in a pretty-support based position. We'll see what happens once Lubna's gone (sad face), as I'm looking forward to taking on some of her roles, at least until a replacement is found.


In regards to my previous co-op, the main difference is the scale. Last co-op, I worked for Drexel's IRT department in the Korman Center, and provided support for pretty much everyone at Drexel,between front desk and telephone support for students and field work going out to the professors' offices. In my time here, I've met everyone at least once, whereas I could spend my entire career at Korman and hardly meet a fraction of the users I might support.

The other major difference is that this is the variety of people I get to work with. At Korman, anyone who wasn't an IT professional, I worked with on a one-time basis, and never spoke to again once they left the help desk. This is the first job I've had where I had to regularly interact with other departments, and it is reassuring to see that I can apparently fit in fairly well in an organization that isn't populated entirely with my fellow nerds.