new ways to stress myself silly

Lots of stuff going on at the moment, hence the significant drop in blog posting. A few things have changed in recent times however, so I thought I'd better document them while they are current, if only for continuities sake.

After a year on the Postgrad Association (PARSA) executive committee, I decided yesterday to resign from my current position as communications officer. Not an easy decision, but in many ways, the most obvious one to make. There are a number of reasons why, but I won't go into them now. The clincher was me being offered a leadership role in an outreach program run by NICTA (National ICT Australia). NICTA, being a government funded ICT research institute (until it generates enough spin off companies, and accumulates enough IP so as to be self sufficient), is required to contribute to the general promotion of engineering at high school level. My role is a voluntary position, but it is not without some perks, and more opportunities should I choose to follow this path further (or even if I don't). Like most things, I tend to follow my nose and just see what becomes of it. I don't think outreach is entirely my thing, but it certainly is something I enjoy when I get the chance to do it.

So what the hell am I doing you ask ? Well, basically, for the next six months I will be coordinating a small team of mostly postgrad students, in developing an educational show to present to high school kids about all the wonders of engineering (or at least, one or two wonders that my team and I choose). As I interpret things, I think our main aim is to convince year 10s that doing maths and physics makes one automatically cool. Needless to say, this task is not without some challenges. It should be fun though. Perhaps the best part of this is that we get free reign on what topic we want to focus on, and what sort of demos and activities we want to present. There is a lot of scope to get quite creative about things, so I'm quite excited about it. Of course, first things first - finding a team of willing contributors. For some reason, this stresses me out, most probably because my past experience suggests that finding postgrad student volunteers to volunteer for anything is somewhat analogous to finding a large cement wall, taking a long run up, and ramming ones head, Zidane style, into it repeatedly. Hopefully it won't be like this.

I should say that at this stage, I haven't resigned from the Postgrad Association Council as a whole. Rather, I have taken a seat on the "back bench" as it were, and look forward to quieter times on that front (although with such low numbers, everyone on the council needs to pull their weight). I want to try and at least keep my involvement with PARSA at this level, but eventually I will have to resign completely, when I go away next year..

So here's to new scenes and challenges .... and new ways to stress myself silly!