The title of this post comes from an article by Martha Durrett, whose message captures the unique nature of the unexpected, variable nature of peer-mentoring – one important part of my work as a Vivero Fellow.
According to the co-leads, the work as a Vivero fellow involves ‘learning how to do your job, on the fly’. Meaning, I would not know the exact questions, problems, or assignments people would come to see me with/for.
This is both slightly intimidating and exciting; It is intimidating due to the increased sense of responsibility I feel from being able to quickly understand the questions, work with a client (who I likely have not interacted before), and eventually propose a solution to their issue. To put this differently, this challenging nature of the job would make it more rewarding and fulfilling to train and prepare to advice people on as many aspects, and maximize the chance of being able to help people with my knowledge.
This raises the question of: Is quantity (i.e. knowing more software and having a vast knowledge in general) more important than quality (i.e. the depth of knowledge about one or two software)? I see the need to clearly define what aspects of the training to focus on.
As we have a lot more Fellows this year all with different expertise and projects, I am coming to the conclusion that I should, on top of mastering the foundational skills of common software, switch at certain point to focus my in-depth training on one or two software. This sets my current motivation as: Building a strong foundational digital humanities skills through the training schedule to start to identify the possible ‘niche’, or in-depth skills I would want to learn in the future.
Notes about the reading:
“What Richard Scarry has to Teach Us About Domains” by bavatuesdays
- I appreciated the use of analogies to explain web concepts – this could be a motivation for when I need to explain concepts during peer mentoring hours.
I think that some people may feel unapproachable to the web or content presentation on the web because of how complex it could look at times. However, this reading reassured me that once I am able to understand the basic concepts with easy-to-understand teams like analogies, then the more complex or specialized contents would be easier to understand and digest.
Example of an analogy (Image courtesy of bavatuesdays ): Using a house to represent a domain and the smaller components (rooms) to explain what subdomains are, in relation to the main domain
