Electronic Materials Processing Assistant

I started my new job this week. The title of my job is the same as the title of this post, but it's too long to write out again, so from here on out, I am an EMPA. When I talk to people, they want to know what I will be doing at my new job. I'll try to explain.

I work for Indiana University's Center for Survey Research. They conduct surveys for various clients. I (and 5 others) were hired to work on the annual National Survey for Student Engagement (NSSE). Over 600 colleges and universities participate in the survey every year, and our job is to process all of the materials that come in from the colleges and universities and are sent out to respondents.

We are spending this week learning more about NSSE and some of the tasks that we will perform. We spent this afternoon pouring over sample spreadsheets of student information "cleaning" them. Our job was to practice finding all of the capitalization, punctuation, and address formatting errors so that we can e-mail and mail the surveys successfully. It was very quiet and very tedious.

Yesterday, the EMPAs had to wait around for the PowerPoint presentation to be set up and we discovered that of the 6 new hires, 5 of us recently moved to Bloomington because a significant other is attending IU for grad school. It sounds like the other grad school spouses are spending their time a lot like me: watching lots of television and movies.

It's nice to start a job with lots of other new people. Even though there are still awkward silences during our break times, we're all learning together and have the shared experience of being in Bloomington because of someone else's education. Hopefully, it will lead to something a little bit more exciting next year!