Getting started in planning

I haven't had much of a chance to blog for the last week. Honestly, I've been working from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. pretty much every day. The work has been exhilirating and the pace exhausting but I've loved every minute of it. The remarkable thing is that my move here was so fast and the work cranked up almost immediately. I created some of that through advanced planning but it has been stunning how quickly things came up.

On the first day of my first full week with QF, we had a staff retreat (picture of our retreat site to the right - Diplomatic Club of Doha) for the Faculty and Student Services team.
Four young professionals took on the responsibility of organizing and preparing for the retreat. They did a terrific job of focusing on getting us more deeply acquainted (we had never retreated before) and looking at the opportunities and challenges of our work. We had a team challenge facilitator from the Reach Out to Asia staff which is another Qatar Foundation program. He was probably the best facilitator I've ever experienced. I'm totally psyched because he will probably be the lead team challenge facilitator for LeaderShape Qatar in January 2008.

The new Faculty and Student Services team is pictured to the left. We're only seventeen strong now but we're adding staff every day. We can hardly add people fast enough, especially when most of our hires involve immigration approval. As you can see, the staff team is very diverse which lends a natural and wonderful flavor to our work.