It feels like it's been a long time since I last updated.
Then I looked at my last post, and it hasn't been that long.
My summer has been busy. Remember that research job I had? Yeah, I got more or less fired today.
What happened was I took a day off on Wednesday cause I had a paper due the next day. Wednesday happens to be when we have our staff meetings and progress meetings. Staff meeting with the department o get a wide view of the project direction (or something like that, I actually never attended one), and progress meetings with the professor so he knows what we're doing. Needless to say, he was pretty unhappy. Wednesday also happens to be the day 1/3 of my weekly hours lands on, cause I don't have any class during business hours on Wednesdays.
Half of my hours falls on Friday. Last Friday was 4th of July, so we had a holiday. The remainder of my hours is split between Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday.
Oh, it's probably important that I mention I'm taking 4 summer classes.
Well, since I missed Wednesday this week, and Friday last week, I had pretty nonexistent hours for the past two weeks. I had too little hours compared to the others I was working with--my average weekly hours came out to be around 11 hours a week, 17 absolute maximum; they easily had 25 hours a week. Another problem was that most of my hours landed on two days, instead of having a even distribution. So, he told me that he thinks I should take a break and focus on my studies, and when I have time for an evenly spread out 20+ hours, I should come back. That would be summer session B, ideally anyways.
So I'm guessing what happened after I got fired was that he had a meeting with the grad student in charge of our day to day activities to give him a evaluation of me. He reported that I was hard working and always managed to complete tasks on time well regardless of my light hours. Then I'm guessing my professor sent out emails, one to me saying he's pleased with the good performance report, and probably one to the grad student instructing him to not assign me anything that couldn't be completed by the end of the day cause I wouldn't be coming back anytime soon.
I'm guessing the grad student didn't like that email very much and responded with objections, in which our professor called the lab and asked to talk with him in person in his office. When he came back, we talked. He told me he reported good things to the professor about me, and despite light hours, I did get the task at hand done on time well. Professor would not like me to stick around if I had other far more important commitments and for lights hours, because I wouldn't have time to understand the entire project. Then there was nothing he could do cause it was an issue between me and the professor. But since the professor received good remarks about me, my last job was to train the person that would be taking over my job.
Course, I'm unhappy with how this all turned out. But, it could have turned out worse, like a bad report, no pay, and permanent leave.
I guess here's another thing I can add to my list of things that could have worked out, but didn't cause I didn't have the time. It seems like all my problems involve not enough time. I guess I'm just trying to fit too much into too little time.
All in all, I'm on unpaid vacation for at least 3 weeks. I'm not sure what to do with all this free time now. Ironically, now I actually have time...
I think I'll spend it in the gym.
