Onward!!

I started work on Monday. First impressions are important, and I think I nailed it pretty well. I certainly didn’t stand out in a wrong way, wearing a blue tennis shirt with white and red stripes, dark blue jeans, brown shoes from Clarks and a brown jacket.*

In the School’s HR department I got handed an official contract to sign about working for the LSE. It is addressed “Dear Colleague,” and includes nifty calculations of yearly pay at the current hourly wage I will be paid. As I sat filling out the various forms, I thought to myself that they are the same pieces of paper my professors and other academics sign when they start employment. Though we are on very different branches and levels of the employment tree, we do share the same employer. At the same time, the employer, as an institution, educates and tests me, and I pay £3000 a year for the pleasure. It is an interesting relationship to be sure.

The other new employees and I were given a tour of the facilities we would be dealing with, along with some of the “perks” – among them a staff room in the library with a fridge and a microwave oven. I will also have a chance to use a computer off-limits to the normal student population if I ever need to, which is great if I ever need to print something during crunch weeks. The bosses seem nice and reasonably down-to-earth – funny, too, if you like nerdy jokes. My colleagues include an Accounting and Finance student as well as a Law student from SOAS. We’ll have fun, I hope. Tomorrow I’ll have a 7-hour seminar discussing the replacement to a piece of software that I have never used. Apparently, it is not a technical, educational session, but a seminar on “implementing best practice”, whatever that means.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 21:14 and is filed under LSE, London, work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.