3 Fellow Report: 3-Month This report focuses on the specifics of your fellowship experience thus far. The following questions are meant to help you evaluate your first three months at your fellowship post. Deadlines for this report are as follows: If you began your fellowship in Your report is due June September 30 July October 31 August November 30 September December 31 1 3 Your Work 1. What is your job title? Monitoring and Evaluation Fellow 2. What are your primary responsibilities? Please list your job duties as you would on a résumé. Extensively employ Stata and TaroWorks to measure the economic impact the BOMA Project has on marginalized women in Northern Kenya. While the majority of my time is spent performing quantitative analysis on business outcomes and saving associations for our monthly reports, I am also pioneering a five-year longevity study that will gauge how the program has improved the livelihoods of participants. 3. Did you receive any sort of orientation, handover or “onboarding” when you started your fellowship? By whom? Not exactly. I went to the Vermont office, where I was met with paperwork and friendly faces eager to onboard me. While this orientation was helpful, I think it was more to get a sense of the company culture and meet the US team. Once in Nanyuki, there was an introduction day that was mainly a formality. This involved a meeting with our HR person, my manager, and the CEO of BOMA. One coworker in particular, the data analyst, provided me with a few dozen do files to study. Mainly my “on-boarding” was reading the work of the past M&E Fellow to get a solid understanding of my role. 4. Describe a representative day at work. 8:30-9:00: Arrive, check-in with supervisor, respond to emails, read the Daily Nation (Kenya’s newspaper). 9:00-1:00: Write code for Stata and derive numbers. I spend a lot of time cleaning up data. 1:00-2:00: office lunch provided. 2:00-4:00: finish up code for that day and prep for M&E meeting (every Monday). 4:00-5:30/6:00: Monitoring and Evaluation team meets with the US team to discuss grants and reports (on Wednesdays). 5. Please describe in greater detail 1-2 specific projects you have undertaken or accomplishments you have made so far. My first project was our May 2016 Exit Report. I independently conducted the analysis, wrote the code, and drafted the 35-page report. This was then turned over to the Development Department for review and is now used for donor relations. My work on the Longevity Study is moving slowly but will culminate in me going into the field in early December. The preemptive work involved creating a qualitative questionnaire for a few different focus groups, and a quantitative questionnaire to later be executed. Once this data has been collected, I will be working to submit a report. 6. On average, how many hours per week do you work? Of course, my work week depends on the status of my assignments, but it can range from 45 to 60 hours/week. Working with the US office has the potential to complicate matters, as is the nature of time zones, but for the most part I feel that I always have more to do, so it’s easy to justify staying late. That said, despite the heavy workload, my supervisor is extremely considerate of my time. For instance, if I have a Swahili lesson, I can leave right at 5:30, and if I’m expected to stay late, my boss lets me know that morning at the latest. While I have had work experiences in which I felt I was staying late in the office solely to cross the t’s and dot the i’s, I really do feel that the time spent here in the office tends to be important. I very rarely feel like I have nothing to do, which is a real blessing for an entry-level job. 2 3 7. What is your office environment like? Please comment on the size and structure of the office(s) where you do most of your work. The Nanyuki office truly has a wonderful work environment. An open floor plan allows for casual vibes and consistent laughter. Because of the small size, people interact frequently, and my only complaint would be that it sometimes veers a little into the unprofessional realm (I am asked weekly about my love life). While the “BOMA family” was emphasized in my orientation, I’m not sure the environment was always like this. Before I arrived, there was some significant turnover: our M&E team was reshaped, our IT department flipped. I think that BOMA has found its groove with its employees, but this is new. Moreover, the other fellow and I have invested a lot in our coworkers, a trend that doesn’t seem to have been prominent with the previous fellows. Because there are only 10 of us, each person contributes a huge amount to the environment. I think my roommate and I, both abnormally extroverted, have forced a more familiar environment onto the office. That said, if you are a less sociable person, you could still definitely get by in the Nanyuki office. I think my conclusion would be: you can embrace the personal or the professional environment within BOMA and it would be ok. I would argue you would get as much as you give out of this experience (as with most experiences). Side note regarding language barriers: While the majority of BOMA employees are Kenyan, everybody speaks English so there is no language barrier to hinder communication, but if you attempt to speak Kiswahili, you will instantly enjoy your experience more. 8. To whom do you report? (Please specify name & title of all applicable persons.) Monitoring and Evaluation Manager. 9. Do you receive adequate direction/support to perform your job? How often do you check in with your supervisor? Absolutely. My manager has an open door policy and is always available to help me when I am stuck on a small issue. When working with Stata, you could spend 45 minutes trying to figure out where one mis-typed letter is. If you can have someone just smooth that bump, it saves you loads of time. She understands that, as does the data analyst, both of whom are eager to teach me. So, in terms of support, I really couldn’t ask for more. Regarding direction, she is also clear – an avid list maker. I was warned that I would have to be a little pushy in getting tasks assigned to me, but I haven’t found that to be the case yet. Instead, I usually finish an assignment and she has another one lined up for me. 10. What opportunities for travel has your work included so far? Do you anticipate work-related opportunities to travel in the future? How does your organization handle the arrangements/costs/plans for your work-related travel? This has been a topic of contention in the office. While I do love the Nanyuki environment and am happy with my workload, I was promised I would go into the field once every two months. My roommate has gone in three times already; despite my frequent request and protestations, I have not gone at all. This is an issue related to the projects I have been put on – arguably, I don’t need to be in the field to understand how to calculate average business value of our participants. That said, it is supposed to be part of the experience and I am working on getting assigned projects that expand past do files. I am excited to be traveling to the field in two weeks, but have been vocally perturbed by the delay in sending me out. I advise the future Fellow to make more of a stink regarding their expectation of in-the-field experience in their first month. All costs, when travelling, are covered by BOMA and handled by BOMA. 11. I feel adequately prepared for my position’s professional responsibilities. a) Strongly agree b) Agree c) Neutral d) Disagree e) Strongly disagree 3 3 Please briefly explain your response. As an economics major with a statistics focus, Stata wasn’t new to me. That said, almost everything I used in school is irrelevant here for my work. I would discourage someone unfamiliar with Stata from taking this position, and instead look more at the qualitative side of M&E, as I had to undergo a pretty steep learning curve in my first month even with this background. I am working to make a “how-to” tutorial for the next Fellow, but most of what I learned was with the help of our data analyst, who unfortunately recently moved back to Nairobi. A strong understanding of Stata, however brutal the prospect of learning it may seem, will open up a lot of future opportunities and I encourage any fellow to develop some basic understandings of it. Or at least, understand what the “tab” command does. 12. Have you met with your supervisor to discuss your work plan assignment? If not, please explain why. Yes, we went over my projects and expectations in my first few days here and continuously refer back to it. That said, as with any NGO, things pop up that you don’t expect, and you have to be pulled off the path a little bit. While some weeks I will be exactly on schedule, we may get a request from the US team for, say, numbers on the school enrollment of 8-year-old girls in Turcana.