andremalan.net

Wow, well today is my last day of working at Student Development on LEAP.

If you are a UBC student and ever get the chance to work for anybody in Student Development grab that chance. It is amazing how everyone in the office is completely dedicated to your success as a student and as a person. Working there You just feel… safe! You know that if anything goes wrong that everyone you work with is there to support you. I would like to thank Tlell and Margot for being such great supervisors, and for taking every opportunity to let me grow in my work at UBC. I don’t know if I will ever find a better boss (I cringe at using that word… that’s how good they are) than Tlell or Margot. I’d also like to thank Angeli, Darryl and Mariana for being such great co-workers and for putting up with my constant stream of crazy ideas. Angeli especially has been very patient with me and my penchant for using different little technological tools to get things done. Collaborating with her on projects was an absolute pleasure and her music keep up a great mood in the office. Although I didn’t work with them directly, Kim, Chad, Shagufta (working at AMS) and Cindy (who works at OLT) have been a wealth of knowledge and I can think of a few times when they have each taken time out of their day to help me.

I have gained so much from this job, I have learnt how to work in a team and collaborate. I have also learnt how to organize myself and to increase my own productivity. I guess perhaps the most important thing that I gained was a passion for learning (hence the title of my site and blog). Although I am sad to leave, I am also excited to get studying again! I want to start applying all that I have learnt at LEAP about learning and technology. I just can’t wait to find some academic knowledge and see if I am better at ingesting it! I will be testing everything I learnt and featured on LEAP (and of course blogging about it afterwards).

So off I go to be and advisor and a student once again, LEAPing, learning and blogging my way through life. It has been a great summer and I just want to say one more great big THANK YOU to all of you who have made it so.

Cheers,

Andre.

I haven’t been blogging for a long time… something that is patently obvious from the lack of actual posts on this blog. You can’t blame me… I used to believe (as many non-bloggers… and even more bloggers do) that blogs are for complaining about your life and looking for sympathy on the internet. Since I’m pretty happy with my life… why on earth would I start a blog?

OK, yes, I know, that was foolish, I now know that blogs are about far more. That they allow us to get our ideas out to the world at large, to be part of an academic community… bloggers are the new scholars who discuss their topics of interest on a far broader scale than anyone could have imagined before. Of course… that’s supposed to be only if you’re good! The best that someone like me, a lowly undergraduate blogger with poor writing skills could hope for was that some of my friends and fellow students read it right?

Wrong! After three entries my blog has already been quoted! By Zoho, my hero in web application building!(you can read it here). To know that an international company with some of the best computer engineers in India has been reading my blog… that I have the power to reach that far with what I say… oh that power feels so good. I guess any seasoned blogger must have gone through this already… that exhilarating rush, that spark that galvanizes you to keep going and to make sure that what you write is good. Because if it’s not good… then it’s not read by anybody, then that delicious power disappears.

(A zoho homepage screen shot… just because everybody should look at it!)