I am frighteningly professional
Frighteningly. Not that professional, but enough that it reminds me I'm approaching adulthood. Please don't suggest that I'm there already; I'm clinging onto childhood as to the scraps of a tattered, ragged security blanket.
So how am I professional? Well, all my interesting correspondences, networking, and research, of course. Read about them below the fold.
So a lot of the work I've been doing so far at CET has been pretty standard intern work. I coined a new phrase for it today: data-zonking. It's data entry or checking, but to the extent that you zonk out a bit from the monotony of it. It's interesting monotony in my case though: I'm working with the database of all CET's clients, which helps me learn about where all we've been working, and is actually helping me memorize all the random towns in Western Mass.
But that's just the filler, the uninteresting stuff around the edges of what I really want to write about in this entry.
So one of the things I've been doing a lot the past two days is research this claim that Peggy (my contact in the office and sort-of supervisor) asked me to investigate. That is, that going vegetarian is THE best thing a person can do for the environment, better than buying a Prius, better than anything. At first, I was doubtful. I'm not a vegetarian, though I sympathize strongly with most of the reasons for it. I was skeptical, though. So I cast about my Google net online, looking for references to it. I found a likely source of the hullabaloo: an article on the Huffington Post, a much-read blog, though one I'd only heard of and not read myself. This article was throwing numbers right and left, and alerting the reader (in its sassy style) to the purported fact that truly, meat production is really bad, and reducing our patronage of these horrid practices is quite a good thing to do.
Well, I was rather derisive in my criticism. It didn't cite enough of its sources, the style and tone of the article soured my stomach a little, but I was curious. I wanted to know what the research was that all this had come from.
Long story...well, still long, but slightly shorter, I came upon three credible sources of this information. One was a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Also I read a news article about a Cornell professor's report. Then there was the continuing work of two UChicago professors. All very authoritative. However, while I garnered squadrons of statistics, I was still confused on a few points. So what did I do? I took my audacity in hand and emailed the emeritus Cornell professor who authored the one study, asking for clarification. Luckily, he's still alive (he was already emeritus in 1997, I think) and sent me a response the next day. He just gave me the PDFs of two more of his studies, but they were slightly informative.
So, that project is currently put aside to make room for other things, but the eventual goal is to produce a handout or flyer about the whole topic.
So there was another instance of my daunting professional communication via email. One of the main locations of my data-zonking has been on this spreadsheet I'm creating. It catalogs a lot of links relevant to the LEED for Homes project. There are a lot of them; I'm now up to about 200 rows on my Excel document, from just two sources. So, basically, I've been inputing them all, and then checking them to make sure the links still work. A number of the first batch (the ones provided in the booklet by the USGBC) didn't work. So, I threw together an email detailing what I'd been doing and all the links I'd found that didn't work and the replacement links I'd found for them, and sent it off to someone at the USGBC office in Washington DC. I think the person I sent it to was the woman in charge of the whole LEED-H program. I was just trying to be helpful...and it turned out I was! She sent me an email back in about an hour articulating the emotions "wow! cool! thanks!" (in more mature, professional words). Then, she sent me another email an hour or so after that, which contained a quote from the consultant she had forwarded my info to. He said it was wonderful and something to the extent of "how do I get an intern like that?" I sent them the email of Christine Terry, the CELS Program Coordinator. But just think of that! I had a brief email correspondence with a person in the Washington office of the organization that created this popular national building standard, in fact with the person who runs the specific part of that program I'm working with! How cool is that! Okay, well I think it's cool.
Oh, this entry is getting really long, and I haven't even talked about my networking experience yet. Wow, I'm not so good at brevity, am I. Sorry, to those of you who slogged through it all. There's just so much to tell! I'll get to the networking in a brief post (ha!) later, and then about all the other stuff in my office, the stuff between the mundane and the extraordinary. That middle-ground stuff is pretty cool too, involving two adorable creatures who drool a lot. Until then...