gainful employment
Oct. 10th, 2007 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksI have a job. I am as surprised as anybody.
I am temping at Local Gigantic University's Accessibility Technology Lab-- same office as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
weirdquark, supervised by another friend. The lab transmutes materials to make them accessible to students with special needs. They have a Braille embosser, and some impressive dictation and voice-recognition software. I'm mostly going to be proofreading things that have been scanned in to be enlarged for large-print versions. The scanner and software are surprisingly good at figuring out what marks on the page are supposed to be a particular letter, but if the print of the work to be scanned itself is blurry or faded, or there are non-English alphabets involved, or footnotes, or weird formatting, or pictures, or all of the above? You get something that really needs proofreading a lot, especially when it's going to be given to someone who needed it blown up large in the first place.
Don't know how long I'll be doing this-- I'm going to be working a fair number of hours for the next while, but it may taper off later in the semester, and I don't have a clue whether they'll need me next semester at all-- but it's the kind of work I find soothing, and I like working with friends, and it feels useful and necessary to the world in general, which is much nicer than most office anything. (Mind you, I suspect, as it started happening today, that I will find myself sitting there hoping that the people I'm prepping the article for do not have the, um, study habits of many undergraduates of my acquaintance over the years. Then I keep telling myself, you know, this could be the key article for somebody's Ph.D. Hard to say.)
And I'm picking up cool snippets of trivia from reading while I proofread.
In conclusion, yay job!
I am temping at Local Gigantic University's Accessibility Technology Lab-- same office as
weirdquark, supervised by another friend. The lab transmutes materials to make them accessible to students with special needs. They have a Braille embosser, and some impressive dictation and voice-recognition software. I'm mostly going to be proofreading things that have been scanned in to be enlarged for large-print versions. The scanner and software are surprisingly good at figuring out what marks on the page are supposed to be a particular letter, but if the print of the work to be scanned itself is blurry or faded, or there are non-English alphabets involved, or footnotes, or weird formatting, or pictures, or all of the above? You get something that really needs proofreading a lot, especially when it's going to be given to someone who needed it blown up large in the first place.Don't know how long I'll be doing this-- I'm going to be working a fair number of hours for the next while, but it may taper off later in the semester, and I don't have a clue whether they'll need me next semester at all-- but it's the kind of work I find soothing, and I like working with friends, and it feels useful and necessary to the world in general, which is much nicer than most office anything. (Mind you, I suspect, as it started happening today, that I will find myself sitting there hoping that the people I'm prepping the article for do not have the, um, study habits of many undergraduates of my acquaintance over the years. Then I keep telling myself, you know, this could be the key article for somebody's Ph.D. Hard to say.)
And I'm picking up cool snippets of trivia from reading while I proofread.
In conclusion, yay job!
