More Training...

Saturday, July 12, 2010

The day started off this morning with training regarding working as staff on Semester at Sea. This consisted of talking about the wonderful world of social networks. Of the approximately 75 faculty and staff members, can you believe that I am the ONLY one with a Twitter account. I can tell you that I was truly shocked. Although I don't utilize my account very often at all, I couldn't believe it. ;) We were highly encouraged to not "friend" our students until our voyage is over, which truly does make a lot of sense. I'm sure that there will be plenty of groups that will be created through Facebook anyway. :)

Today's training was quite disjuncted because Chief Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's (or as the LLCs lovingly call her S-DOC) session was this morning. I hope that when I am her age, I can be as sharp and witty. She has an amazing life story and even better stories. It was such an amazing honor to hear her.

After the keynote address, and lunch, we had some more training. The ship uses "Maxient", which is a database for conduct. This form will be used for conduct as well as for students as they request nights off the ship. It's quite a versatile program, although they haven't used it for very long. The struggle I had with the program is that the forms are public. At UCI we had a similar conversation regarding public incident reports for anyone to report something. I think I'll learn more about the flexibility of this program once I have to utilize it. Can you all pray that I never will?!

Next we met with the ship's captains and officers about health and safety roles and procedures. Like any other ship at sea, the MV Explorer is required to conduct a lifeboat drill at the beginning of every voyage. So on Tuesday, when our students get on board, the ship crew will conduct another lifeboat drill. This time the other LLCs and I will help staff the drill. Should be interesting. I will make sure to take a picture of the attractive outfit next for a blog update. :)

Next we walked the ship with Joe, our Community Resource Officer. Joe is a retired LAPD officer. He will be on duty every evening and walk the halls of the ship. It will be very nice having some backup during duty nights. I only three nights, but we'll see how busy they will be. :( Joe has been on several Semester at Sea voyages, so he's very familiar with where and how students try to hide things. He knows every nook & cranny of the ship. His expertise will be very helpful to the LLCs. ;)

After dinner, the LLCs met with Jill, Lynette and Cindy. Cindy was the DOS on the last voyage. She came to the meeting with so many treats. We finally got to speak about detailed responsibilities of each of the LLCs jobs. I left the meeting feeling a bit overwhelmed, because it would have been helpful to have had more of this information earlier in the week, but Cindy and Jill helped relieve some of that stress. I'm a little anxious about my relationship with faculty, as I will be leaning on them most for one major part of my job, but I had a brief conversation with Dean LaVahn and it was helpful to hear his vision for these special sessions.

One of the highlight of my day was that my ship steward Auxilio converted my two twin beds into a queen-sized bed. I really just wanted to see if he could help me move the bed, but when I got back to the room it was already done. That is the best definition of efficiency. Thanks Auxilio!!