J'adore Bangalore: Hello again, world.

The grads are here! The grads are here! *runs around wildly waving hands in the air*

That is my number one reason for having been absent from blogging for the past week-and-a-half or so. Number two was yet another Flickr snafu (all fixed now) and number three was the fact that most of my adventuring has been limited to classroom teachings and project inceptions - not exactly the most interesting of blog topics.

Having said that, ThoughtWorks University 29 is in full swing and I'm loving it. Altogether, we're a batch of 62 students and 14 trainers. Everybody is divided into two teams - the one I'm on is called the 'Autobots' and we basically do everything in parallel with our 'Decepticon' friends. Even though 31 grads is much more of a manageable size than 62 (though it is still quite a lot!), a drawback of splitting up is that we don't get to spend as much time with everyone together.

What have I actually been doing, you ask? Exactly what's on my business card - being a cat herder. I wake up in the morning to Skype with parents + friends + the boy, catch the 8 AM bus to the office, and grab a quick breakfast (two hard boiled eggs, chutney, sanbar, idly, and a moosambi juice) on the roof of our building. Throughout the day my time is divided between organizing trips/events, preparing for sessions, pairing with my fellow trainers, having one-on-one feedback sessions with coachees, ignoring my inbox, facilitating retrospectives, and of course, actually hosting sessions. Then in the evening I have a catch-up with my trainers and if I'm lucky, have a few minutes to weed through the clusterfuck that is my inbox to address the important items. We Autobot trainers also often meet up with the Decepticon ones to share cross-team experiences and to compare how our parallel days and sessions went. By the time I get home, it's usually quite late and every ounce of my body just screams "get yer ass in bed, young lady!" but some nights I have to stay up and wrangle with my inbox or catch up with other projects/activities that I didn't have time for during the day. Every single day thus far has proven to be more challenging and more busy than the previous. And everything feels like organized chaos. The good news is that it's not going to be this way forever; once the project simulation begins in a week, the trainers will have much less of an active role as grads start to step up begin to self-organize...knock on wood.

In addition to balancing a hectic schedule, another challenge for me has been learning people's names. I know everyone's face quite well by now but I think I've only got about 80% of the names down in the Autobots (and maybe 30% of the Decepticons... sad but true). It is especially difficult for me to remember the Indian and Chinese grads' names because I'm simply not used to having "Aarthy"s and "Xiaojing"s in my vocabulary, whereas an "Alex" is pretty easy for me to remember. I also tend to get introduced to grads in groups instead of one-on-one, which makes things all the more confusing. Grandma Rose just can't keep up with the young'uns!

But enough about work - let's move on to playtime!