New job skills on the research assistant front

My GRA thus far has largely consisted of distributing flyers in target neighborhoods throughout Portland and calling prospective families that have indicated they are interested in participating in the Family Activity Study. Neither one is particularly glamorous, but I understand that this sort of leg work is necessary to facilitate what will hopefully be helpful findings once all of the data is processed. I find it a little ironic that I am not much of a salesman, nor am I terribly extroverted, yet in the log of contact with prospective families, I record a lot more contacts and conversations in a setting then my colleagues do. I suspect that the others don't really care as much for working the phones, after all many of the participants have tricky questions, or else have odd situations where a judgment call is necessary to determine if they are still eligible for the study. There's also the matter of scheduling a drop off and pick up of our equipment with them that doesn't conflict with any of the deliverers schedules, yet be close in enough that we are keeping our equipment out in the field as much as possible.

Today I learned a little about the process of mailing off gift cards as a reward to families that completed the study. We determine the amount of gift cards based upon how much useful data we received and how good they were about wearing both their accelerometers and GPS units. Anyway, there's tight control over the gift cards so as none go missing, and we also have to get signatures on a thank you letter from Jennifer Dill, the professor at Portland State that's ultimately overseeing this research. Anyway, processing gift cards is a rather bureaucratic process because of all this leg work involved and we didn't go through nearly as many households as I would have thought for how long we worked on it. Oh and people in Portland love them some Fred Meyer gift cards; they are by far and away more popular than the gift cards for New Seasons, Burgerville and Target.

I am getting comfortable with several of the other Master's and PhD students involved in the research. I won't have too many classes with these people since I have to take the first year core courses, and most of them are second year Master's students or else PhD students that aren't actively taking classes. On Thursday I will have my orientation and get to meet more of my cohort and of course learn more about the curriculum. There's a happy hour right after the orientation that I intend on going to and perhaps work on making some good acquaintances. I have had to remind myself that despite having gotten into the groove of being a research assistant, which I like very much, I will be a student first come next week and have to juggle both responsibilities.