Digging In

It's Thursday of my first week of school and I can't really believe I'm here. I feel like a kid in a candy shop, like a convict released from prison, like a refugee arriving on friendly soil. I mean no disrespect to the job I've left. I just feel so lucky to be here that the air is just that much sweeter, even though I'm in the city. And I can't get this silly smile off my face.

On my second day of class, I got a little deeper into numbers with my second statistics class. We learned a few basic concepts and then went to the computer lab to enter some data into SPSS, a common statistical software. With the fellowship, I purchased a new computer for my use here and beyond. I took the bold move to go Microsoft-free and loaded Ubuntu 8.10, a version of Linux on my new machine. It is wonderful to be in the open source community and this machine works like a racehorse. But now I'm wondering if I should purchase SPSS for this computer, or if I should learn R like my buddy Charles is recommending. R is an open source statistics program that seems a bit hard to learn, but also seems much more powerful. I guess I need to figure out if it's worth my time to learn R or if I should just stick to using SPSS on the computers in the lab here and keep my new machine totally open source.

But I digress. After statistics, I took the streetcar down to one of Portland's holy sites, Powell's Books. I remember it from an earlier visit. I think the only way to approach the place is to go there with one book in mind. If you try to explore the whole store or just wander around, it's enough to make your head explode. Since I couldn't find a used copy of the textbook I needed, I got out of there as quickly as I could to mitigate any undue damage to my pocketbook, and indeed my brain.

On the way back to campus, I needed to grab some food before my three hour class that started at 5:30. I stumbled upon Kenny and Zukes, a seemingly upscale Jewish deli in downtown Portland. They served me probably the best reuben I've ever had outside of Katz's deli. It had a pile of some amazing pastrami on it. Like my cousin Joe used to say, "it's the meat that makes the sandwich."

Fully sated, I sat in on my first class on research methods for social work. I'm taking this class to get a broad sense of how research methods can apply to social work. I've also chosen the professor for this class with an eye to getting some ideas about the research guidebook that I'd like to write. This professor does a good job of boiling down research methods into its essential elements. As I start thinking about a guidebook that will help other mentoring professionals incorporate research practices into their daily work, learning how someone else simplifies research methods for a broad introduction seems like a good opportunity.

This class is taught for MSW students and it's interesting to see the difference from the PhD classes I'm taking. The professor is a fun guy and it very much trying to draw the class into the subject matter. The smaller classes for PhD students seem already to have the engagement of the students and are maybe a bit more suited to having engaged debate within the class. It's good to see the difference and understand how research methods are presented to different levels of graduate students. I think it will help me conceive better of the different audiences for research and how this new world of academics operates as a whole.

On Tuesday, my mentor Tom Keller also showed me my new office.
Tom has two offices on campus and is letting me use the one he hardly uses. It's at the Regional Research Institute, an organization affiliated with PSU that does a lot of social work research. As I sit here and type, I can't believe that I actually have a view out of my office window, let alone a view from the 9th floor of the Willamette riverfront and Mt Hood on a clear day.

I've had lots of crappy offices in my time working at Big Brothers Big Sisters. When I first started, I had a window office. But then we started growing so quickly and space was at a premium, that I always took the smaller offices for privacy and gave my employees the bigger ones with windows to share. I once worked in a room with no windows slightly bigger than a closet. My last office was roomy, but it only had a tiny window that looked out onto another building. If it was a rare sunny day, there were about 10 minutes each day where I could feel the sunshine bounce off of the windows of the building next door and onto my face. So I will enjoy this spot immensely while I am here.

Today, Tom and I met again to talk about our work together. We are conceiving of two research projects to work on together. One that I will help on is analyzing some of the data gathered from participants in the 2007 Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring, which I attended. We want to see how participants went back to their practice setting and were or were not able to apply some of the research concepts that they learned at the Institute. I think that Tom is hoping my perspective as an attendee will provide some insight into the data gathered from the other participants. He also wants to get my ideas on helping design the 2009 Institute, which is thrilling to me since that's where this adventure of mine first took off.

We also want to look more closely at some of the data he's collected in a previous study of a Big Brothers Big Sisters school-based mentoring program. We want to look at the characteristics of the Bigs and the Littles and see how these impacted the strength and quality of the mentoring relationships. I am very excited by this topic since it seems to me we know very little about what makes for a good match. We match our Bigs and Littles primarily based on shared interests, geography, and parental concerns. But we know very little about what personality types make the best match or what questions we should ask during our participant interviews to get the right information to make the best match. It's exciting to think that I might be able to help build some useful knowledge for the mentoring field while I learn the ropes of writing a research paper.

Tomorrow, I'm going to meet with Michael Garringer at the National Mentoring Center to discuss my fellowship at the guidebook project in particular. I am hoping to use the resources of the center to publish the guidebook and disseminate it in the field. Then I will have the first meeting with Tom and my colleagues in our reading seminar. Two graduate students and myself will be immersing ourselves in the literature of youth mentoring research. Finally I will have a justification to read all those articles I've been wanting to read and the time to do it! This seminar will also provide a good foundation for the literature review I'll need to do in preparation for the research paper.