Checking In

Hey Luke, Jamie, and Melissa,

First off, I would like to apologize. I had stuff written for an additional post and just never posted it. I've been swamped with classes, activties, and planning for my student teaching next fall. I have included what I said earlier below. I hope your training day went well, and it sounds like you guys have been very busy.

It sounds like your induction meeting went fine. I think you are right in saying that you sometimes have to be thrown into the deep end. We have training for our tutors but ultimately we are just thrown into it. We do have guidance which is the role you guys can fill.

I’m just going home for Easter so nothing too special. Things are going well for me, I’ve been swamped with school stuff the last month, but I will be done soon enough.

Northwest is same as always. We are experiencing Higher Education cuts, so that has been stressful as we see what cuts will be made. I hope everything is going well on your end and Luke, I hope the living arrangement with your girlfriend has worked out well!

It looks like I will be coming back to Birmingham in July, so I am very excited to see all of you again.

Best wishes,

Kirk

Post I should have posted earlier…

“Here is the second response to your posts. I hope everything is going well!!

Under BCU Employability Attributes – how to use and recognize (I’ll use the American spelling…mostly because my computer corrects me every time I type the British spelling.) transferable skills.
Jamie – I absolutely love this. I have to do a presentation on my visit in November to my fellow TDC staffers, and I wasn’t sure how I wanted to go about it. I think this exercise is exactly what I was looking for because I wanted the discussion to be about student employment and how to get more out of it along with my experiences! This is absolutely good or bloody brilliant (to use your lingo). I think that it should be used multiple times through training. If you have more information on this post, I would appreciate it, because I think it is definitely something we can use at NW.
Update: Jamie, I did use this in a presentation and it worked well. I might end up doing something similar with it for our Career Pathing program at Northwest.

Under HEI report:
It sounds like that was a fascinating read… I like the conclusions you drew from it and they make good sense. I like how you were planning on dedicating a person to manage the mentoring and the possible credit/recognition for mentors. Originally, when I came Birmingham, I was confused because I had a different definition of mentor and compared it more to our induction advisors, so to me having mentors as part of a retention strategy includes that induction mentoring and I think it is an important component.

Under Jam and Mel Statements
Awesome. I love see what motivates you and what you hope to gain from the experience.

Under Active Listening:
This is something that is difficult to do but is extremely important."