Information Overload

I’m not exactly sure if it’s information overload, but getting off work tonight I felt like my brain was going to explode. I woke up this morning to go to a meeting with my research group mates. We needed to prepare for our Institutional Board Review meeting regarding our research project. We are looking into the effectiveness of one of the programs where I work. It should be really interesting when everything is all said and done.

The Institutional Review Board meeting was really interesting and got into a lot of really great information. We have a number of edits to make, but all of them are fairly minor. I really believe that the many hours me and my group have put into our project were well spent in creating a great product. After deciding to get together first thing tomorrow to make a majority of the edits, I was off to home to send a flurry of emails and then to work.

I got to work over a half hour early, but I guess that I should have gotten there much earlier. I’ve been working in some off time on creating a database in MS Access to store information on various grants. It’s been kind of cool to spend time working with databases, because it’s not an area I have a lot of experience in yet. Anyways, as soon as I came in, I was demonstrating and talking about the database. As my shift started, I took a minute to prepare for my family session that I would be facilitating. This family is the first that I will be working with all the way through. It went well, but the rest of the day seemed non stop. Leading group felt like a failure… but I guess that happens sometimes and it is really difficult to try to teach a group of teenagers about taking responsibility for themselves.

All in all, I guess I’m just a bit tired and ready for to actually seem like winter break. Maybe next week, but I wouldn’t be too sure about that. I also heard an interesting story on NPR (well, actually I think it was Australia’s public radio) about a website that Australia just started. It’s called Talking Works. It’s a pretty interesting idea. The website is basically to reach out to youth in Australia who are “missing,” i.e. ran away from home or something like that. I don’t think that we have anything as youth focused here in the states, and I liked the format of the site. I wonder if it would be something that might be productive to have here in the US.