Working at ORI

Thought I'd fill everyone in on how my first week as a working woman went! Its been a little bit slow to get moving... this week we have had little to do and a lot of spare time on our hands. But yesterday we got trained in our main responsibility, which is called diagnostic interviewing. The study we are working on is called Healthy Weight (www.ori.org/healthyweight)and is basically looking at freshmen female college students and how their body acceptance changes over the course of two years... 1 group will get a 1 month 1x/week training class and another control group will just get a pamphlet on healthy eating. Anyway...at different time points our main tool of assessment is an interview that asks really detailed questions about eating disorders and depression so we were trained on how to be sensitive and get the information we need for data entry. Now that we have completed the training we have to listen to taped interviews and rate the answers to each question and they run stats on our ratings to see if we are up to par with the rest of the lab and how they would rate the same interview. After that we are ready to start observing real interviews and then do our own!

I think it will be a really good experience working in a behavioral research lab..very different from hphy research! Plus the people and the institute are really great! I've never heard of a job with soooo many benefits and perks! Everyday I hear of something else great! My favorite is that if we carpool or take alternate transportation to work 5 days a week we get PAID $6.50 each week as an incentive!!!

Although I think I will really like it here...it has been hard getting used to working full time again.. I've been working part time all summer. I feel like I dont have any time to get anything done... we just eat sleep and work!