Someone notices

I have been working at CSES now for about two months on a project for the SEEK employment index. Essentially my role was to write programs to analyse the number of applications and number of advertised jobs and pass them onto my supervisor. It was a frustrating experience writing the code and organising the data so that it runs right. I was satisfied when on Monday this week I had finally finished that project.

That night though I actually wondered if anybody besides my boss ever read the report that is produced each month. I started to think that in general, the more you get paid the less impact your work has. As a teacher at AGU I wasn’t paid much yet it was bang for buck for those I worked with – students, staff, and community people.

Here in Australia, we have a lot of people paid good salaries and it appears that not much is really done. Although people produce work it is not as obvious as it was at AGU or work in a restaurant or on a construction site. So I was surprised today when I opened the newspaper and saw a reference to the SEEK EI report. I was proud that some of the work I did possibly benefited some people and made it into the press.

The project that I am currently working on is one on climate change. I hope that this will also have some impact. The impact is getting a lot of money for our centre and to run lots models – and running the models is my thing.