First day

Today was my first day at MSRI, and it was really great. I can hardly believe how productive it was already. The facilities are incredibly nice: lots of live green plants and wooden floors, a "pantry" on every floor with fresh fruit and cookies and water and good coffee. Lunch is provided every day, and it's awesome stuff. Today's caterer did South Indian food, which is my favorite.

I had lunch with my supervisor, and we discussed my project and how to proceed. As you can imagine, since he's the director of a research group at MSRI, he's brilliant, but he's also kind and approachable. I really appreciated his time and input. We decided on 4 projects for me to pursue initially, with the feeling that I'll know more about how to proceed from there after interviewing stakeholders for those projects first. My supervisor emailed his contacts at those projects, and I already have two interviews pending! I did a pilot interview with one of the researchers on the team to gauge how long the interview might go and how clear the questions are. It went really well, and he provided good input afterwards about a couple of questions that I'll reword.

In addition to all the cool project stuff, there were lots of meetings with various support teams for orientations, and my head felt stuffed. They were all nice and said to come ask later if I have questions or can't remember something. That's really good b/c I'm not sure that I retained all the various folder names and Sharepoint locations and processes...

Well, it's only 7:30 p.m. here, and I'm pooped. I remember feeling this way in Kyrgyzstan at first, too. Because so much is new and everything seems to require so much thinking and effort at first, by early evening, I'm exhausted. It'll get better as I get more used to things. In the meantime, it's early to bed for me!