Skillz

Fact: Administrative work is hard and scary.

Maybe not in every office, but it's true in mine. Before I started this job, I thought that administration would be fairly easy: somebody else would come up with the ideas and take all the risks, and I would just shuffle the necessary papers. 

But that is absolutely not true. Somebody else does come up with most of the ideas that I implement at work, but I have to make them happen. My job requires a lot of flexibility and creative thinking. When my program director or one of my faculty members has an idea, the onus is on me to follow it through. I'm everybody's go-to girl. I'm the nitty-gritty techno-wrangler, the smooth bureaucracy surfer, and the (supposedly) omniscient fact-knower about how to navigate the university.

When I first started this job, this responsibility scared me. I didn't know anything, and I didn't know how I was going to learn anything. Now I have a little more faith in myself, and I know my most valuable resources: our genius office manager, our dedicated IT guy, the department's knowledgeable HR liaison, KU's Google-based search engine, and the University's plethora of help videos and training workshops.

Now I can hire a new lecturer in three days flat. I can school a scanner so that it doesn't flip pages. I can track down a student ID based on little more than a misspelled first name and a department. I can tell you how to enroll in or drop a class at any point in the semester. I'm good.

It's pretty great that I can do this stuff, but the most important skill my administrative job has taught me is how to problem solve, how to take a question that no one else can deal with and track down the answer. My new greatest skill is my dauntlessness, my confidence in my ability to take an idea and make it into a reality.