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The University has finally learned what the budget cut is going to be this biennium. The state is cutting its contribution to the budget by 26%, but it is allowing the University to raise tuition enough that the actual reduction of the budget will be 12%. This is obviously still a massive cut, and there will be layoffs. Administrative units such as the one I work in will be hit harder than academic units.

I don't really know how I will be affected by this. I don't expect that I will lose my job (I've got twenty years of seniority), but it's possible I'll take a pay cut. The Registrar told us this morning that if anyone wants to voluntarily look at reducing their hours, now's the time to step forward. One of my co-workers died of lupus earlier this year, and she had been out for months. Her position will not be filled, and we've known that since last Fall and have already restructured the work in our office around that. Someone in the other office my boss manages is retiring at the end of the month, and her position won't be filled either.

Hm. I guess this is just an anxiety post. No particular point to it, except now we know the size of the budget shortfall. Later in the week we will start getting a more concrete sense of what it all means on the ground here.

Job change

Feb. 16th, 2007 09:24 am
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I mentioned recently that my job duties were about to change. This change has now been effected, and upon my return from Corflu I moved into a new cubicle that's a much smaller space than my previous one. However, I'm not in a fishbowl anymore where people could stare in through a window at me, and I've set it up to feel pretty cozy. I've had my first couple of jobs assigned -- extracting enrollment figures for the Art department courses for the past two years, quarter by quarter, and extracting parent addresses for a certain group of students to prepare mailing labels for some kind of mass mailing. This job will require me to learn the ins and outs of various tables in our student database, and it will also require me to learn how to translate requests for information into database queries. I've done a fair amount of work with queries in the past, and I enjoy the puzzle and problem-solving aspect. One of the tricky parts is making sure that you are asking the right question of the database, so to speak. It's also possible to approach the questions from a number of different angles -- i.e., enrollment figures can be looked at from the registration side or the transcript side, which are two different sets of tables.

Anyway, this also means a new boss and new colleagues, although they are people I already know, so that shouldn't be such a big deal. My position is professional, so a certain amount of independence is expected. Still, my old boss from before even my last boss, seemed sorry to see me move out of her side of the building at last and seemed upset that I had been given such a small cubicle. I was a little dubious myself at first, but I'm already adjusting. Now I'm on the warm side of the building, too, so I won't freeze in the winter. However, I'll boil in the summer, so it all evens out. I don't have quite as much privacy here either, so we'll see if my LiveJournaling diminishes. So far, it doesn't seem as if it will!
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Didn't I just wish that I would drift someplace in my job where I would be useful? Well, it appears that I'm now going to drift right into the Data Management office (which is still within the Office of the Registrar), with a fairly substantial raise to boot. Not clear yet what the new job duties will be (I will retain my current duties and job title), but it will probably involve data extraction and reporting, possibly even a little programming. The phrase "data cubes" was bandied about. Whatever. Considering how useless I've been feeling here, I'm a bit agog at the news. Gosh. Did I mention the raise? What did I do to deserve this?!

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