Monday, May 3, 2010

My wife status...

Last few weeks, several people have written me to know a little bit about my wife... Her current professional status to be precise...

Kathy is statistician and mathematician (as we already said it long time ago) and at the moment is finishing some volunteering at Mission Australia.

Don't you know if you want to go volunteer?
Be noble and do something for your community...

Volunteer??? What is that?
A volunteer or voluntary is someone whom provides their services without payment for their time, effort or expenses.

Why is she working as volunteer?
Mission Australia.
Well.... several reasons, first she wanted to familiarise with the working environment in Australia, wanted to get some local working experience and wanted to learn new tools of wide use in the Australian market.

When we arrived and started looking for job, she was a bit worried about some tools required on most of the roles published in the Internet. One of those tools is SAS, which isn’t part of her working experience (or knowledge as the matter of fact) though she had worked with similar tools before.

Working as volunteer she managed to contact some people with the knowledge and position to start working with such tools (or Australian data).

Why should I go volunteer? Is there any benefit?
Yes... A volunteer is very noble activity; where people have fun, improve their people and technical skills.

Where can I find more information?
Kathy loves go volunteer web site; but there are tons and tons of them, such as seek volunteer or volunteering Australia. Check that out!

If you have comments or questions, write it below :P
Cheers.

2 Comments:

Evan Stubbs said...

I hope your wife got all the support she needed; I read your post shortly before going on leave and meant to reply, but unfortunately things crept up on me a little faster than expected!

One of the nice things about the mathematical / statistical community in Australia is that it's quite active. If your wife's interested in meeting some other people who are interested in applies mathematics in an industry context, the Sydney Data Mining User Group and IAPA are quite good starting points.

It's always fun reading about people's experiences moving to a new country; even the simplest things can be surprising! I lived in Africa when I was a kid and I remember how difficult it was to understand a bus timetable! :)

Out of interest, has your wife found the experience worthwhile at a professional level after having finished?

Rod said...

Hey Evan,

She found it quite interesting. In fact, she worked with them for a little longer till she actually got called to a job interview and qualified for the position.

Thanks for the info and the comment, she find it attractive.

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