Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Current favorite song...

Wow... I suck at blogging

I recently started reading some of my friend's blogs and realized that I am not very good at staying loyal to this task of blogging. I'm not sure if it is due to a certain aspect of laziness or just the fact that I'm not one to re-tell stories. Anyway, as I now find myself alone in Doha (Lindsay is in the USA starting her Ph.D) I figured I could fill some time by blogging since I no longer have a loving girlfriend to listen to me attentively... or pretending too, which I wouldn't blame her for doing.

So, where to start? What's new in my life? Well, for starters, I no longer working housing (yay!) nothing personal about housing and residence life, but after 4 years of on-call duty and residence life work, things can get stale. I am now a Campus Life Coordinator working in the new Hamad Bin Khalifa Student Center (formerly the Education City Student Center... long story). The job is great, a bit stressful at times but a welcomed change from my previous work. Currently I'm working on multiple projects including the annual welcome back event called "Ya Hala". The event itself is pretty simple, a night of food and
fun but it's just the immense amounts of bureaucracy here at Qatar Foundation that makes life a little bit more difficult. Outside of "Ya Hala", I'm working with a committee that I chair to plan the annual Education City Student Leader Workshop. I get to work with colleagues from around Education City (all 6 campuses and the Academic Bridge Program) to plan a half-day leadership workshop. It's fun but also a lot of work. Also, on my radar is the Education City Family Day which is an annual event where we invite families of students to visit campus and learn more about their son/daughter's experience. Luckily I have a colleague, Hessa, who is Qatari and she will be able to do a lot of the work for this event. Hessa is a Georgetown-Qatar graduate and she is new to the position and field. I get to train her on what it means to be in "Student Affairs" and it's pretty rewarding. My job also entails a lot of odds and ends work with our new facility. Curt, my boss, has me working on some facility related projects which I really enjoy. Speaking of Curt, another aspect I like about my job is the team I work with, they are very chill and helpful... always a good combination.

August has been super busy and it's currently Ramadan so that means no food/drink during the day, always an interesting variable. September is also going to be a very busy month but October is what I'm looking forward to because I get to go home and visit Lindsay and hopefully see my mom and dad. I booked my ticket from Doha to Atlanta last week and I'm pumped. Other upcoming travel includes Sri Lanka possibly the end of this month and China in November!!! I'll blog about those at a later date.

I leave you with a slide show of the HBKU Student Center, where I work!