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casimendocina · 05-20-2011, 10:52 AM

Standard answer to this question of what I'm doing at the moment goes like this:

Every year the Australian Government grants 300 scholarships to Indonesians so that they can do their Masters and PhDs in Australia (they've upped the number slightly this year). As a condition of being granted a student visa, the candidates need to get a particular score in an English language test and depending on their language level when they are accepted, they need to attend 6 or 8 weeks or 3, 6 or 9 months of pre-departure language/cross-cultural training so that they're able to cope with the Australian university environment on arrival. So at the moment, I'm teaching the first 3 months of the pre-departure language training for a group of students on a 6 month program. Aside from that, the place that I work at also offers preparation courses for the language test in question. Seeing that it's mostly Australian tax dollars that pay my salary, I am officially a public servant (if I remember correctly I signed that I would abide by the law relating to the transportation of plutonium WTF...hmmm actually not so bizarre-more emails from the embassy today regarding the "level of danger"), so part of my contract for this job specifies that I must be doing some kind of study. Sometime last century, straight after I finished my undergraduate degree, I started a Library and Info Management Grad Dip which I only did 3/4 of. I thought that if I had to study, I may as well finish something I'd already started, so that's what I'm up to at the moment. The current subject is cataloguing using MARC21 which involves a whole of knowing where to put $ and # and various bits of punctuation. Yesterday before leaving work I printed off the MARC standards which lists every single consideration that needs to be taken into account when cataloguing-86 pages. In theory, it's all quite straight forward, but you have to work out which rule is applicable to which piece of information.

The pep talk the course co-ordinators gave us via the web was that it was like learning a new language so it required practice...fair enough...doesn't particularly increase my enthusiasm for it though.

05-20-2011, 10:52 AM	#3548
casimendocina Professor Join Date: Jun 2009 Posts: 1,622	Standard answer to this question of what I'm doing at the moment goes like this: Every year the Australian Government grants 300 scholarships to Indonesians so that they can do their Masters and PhDs in Australia (they've upped the number slightly this year). As a condition of being granted a student visa, the candidates need to get a particular score in an English language test and depending on their language level when they are accepted, they need to attend 6 or 8 weeks or 3, 6 or 9 months of pre-departure language/cross-cultural training so that they're able to cope with the Australian university environment on arrival. So at the moment, I'm teaching the first 3 months of the pre-departure language training for a group of students on a 6 month program. Aside from that, the place that I work at also offers preparation courses for the language test in question. Seeing that it's mostly Australian tax dollars that pay my salary, I am officially a public servant (if I remember correctly I signed that I would abide by the law relating to the transportation of plutonium WTF...hmmm actually not so bizarre-more emails from the embassy today regarding the "level of danger"), so part of my contract for this job specifies that I must be doing some kind of study. Sometime last century, straight after I finished my undergraduate degree, I started a Library and Info Management Grad Dip which I only did 3/4 of. I thought that if I had to study, I may as well finish something I'd already started, so that's what I'm up to at the moment. The current subject is cataloguing using MARC21 which involves a whole of knowing where to put $ and # and various bits of punctuation. Yesterday before leaving work I printed off the MARC standards which lists every single consideration that needs to be taken into account when cataloguing-86 pages. In theory, it's all quite straight forward, but you have to work out which rule is applicable to which piece of information. The pep talk the course co-ordinators gave us via the web was that it was like learning a new language so it required practice...fair enough...doesn't particularly increase my enthusiasm for it though.