My First Real Job

So here I am, finally, posting about my new job. For those that don't know I am an editor at Western Governor's University up in Murray. It's an online university that measures student success by using assessments. They have two types of assessment: objective and performance. Objective assessments are objective test questions (multiple-choice, matching). Performance tasks are more involved. The students are given tasks to do (usually writing an essay or doing a project). The way the university works is that they have subject-matter experts determine what a person would need to know first-day-on-the-job in a given field. They then write competency statements (such as "the graduate will know how to do....") and then write objectives that would fulfill the competency requirements. Then all objective and performance assessments have given objectives that test questions directly align to.

My job is to edit these objective and performance assessments to first make sure they align to the objectives (if they don't, the student cannot be proved to know the needed information for their field.) I also edit for formatting, grammar, parallelism, and clarity. I also edit response options to make they are not too obvious (they don't make "give-away" answers as students can then guess. Guessing is not proof of knowing.) and that they are plausible answers while being clearly incorrect.

So that's a short explanation of the university and my position. I have now been there 2 weeks. I have been to tons of training meetings and pretty much all I've done is work on practice material. (I've done about 70 practice objective assessments and 15 practice performance tasks.) This week we're (I started the same time as two other people) hoping that we get to start doing real work. I think I'll enjoy my job. It's been hard getting used to getting up early and commuting everyday. (I spend around 2 hrs everyday on the road.) I'm also getting used to working an 8-hour day again. It's been awhile since I've had a full-time job. I actually like pretty much everything about my job except the commute. But Austin has made it better by checking-out books on CD for me. I've already finished one book and started another.

The people I work with are all really nice and friendly. I particularly like one of the new guys who started with me. He has a sense of humor that makes getting through work easier. We get food frequently (for birthdays or when accredition or reviews are scheduled). I'm fortunately allowed to wear jeans most of the time. (When accredition people are there they like us to dress up.)

I really like the sense of collaboration that's there. People frequently work together to figure things out.

I don't like the commute or being exhausted when I get home or getting up early. But I like the job. I don't think I'd be able to do it forever because it really isn't the area of editing that I truly love, but it's a great start and a great job. I make decent money and I get pretty good benefits that start November 1.

So that's my new job!