A Good Start

My first full week of graduate school was not bad at all, in fact it was good.

Anyone that has ever worked with me knows I love those human resource group activities where the whole engineering department maps out their personalities, work styles or some other profile on a grid. It gave me a much better understanding of my non-verbal co-workers. Usually management got everyone to do these "team building exercises" just as the working group was about to implode from stress. In the engineering world I mapped out on these grids as an anomaly, the statistical flyer in the data average. Explaining why relative strangers would say to me when I told them what I did for work: "Really? You don't seem like an engineer." Happily, not so in the PT-student world!

While I am the ripest tomato in the box, I am not the only tomato in the box! As a class of 26 we mapped our learning styles. There are four styles: Doing, Experiencing, Thinking and Reflecting. We all use these four styles at some time in our learning process but, we tend to rely more heavily on one style over the other three. I map into the "Doing" category (I know, I know this is completely shocking) and so do 7 other people! Heh-heh, I am not an asymptotic statistical data point in the PT population.

The best part of this teambuilding exercise was that we presented our learning style to the rest of the class. In 15 minutes, the "Doers" (that's my group!) put together a power point presentation and two skits. I love my creative, risk-taking, doer group!

So in my first week I did a team building exercise straight up and I realized I am not the statistical odd ball in the group - pretty darn good first week.