Two to Twelve Hour Days

This year’s Climate and Society class is out in the field (or lab or office) completing a summer internship or thesis. They’ll be documenting their experiences one blog post at a time. Read on to see what they’re up to.

Avalon Hoek Spaans, C+S ’18

(Source: Magda Ehlers, Pexels)

Movement and structure. I didn’t realize how important these two words were until they recently began to shift. For the past 22 years of my life, my movement and structure were defined solely by my education. In preschool, days were defined by the duration of my naptime. In elementary, middle, and high school, it was the same classes from 8-3 where I sat through three block periods and had the same 30-minute lunch break every day.

Although in my undergraduate and graduate school years I had more of a choice on my class schedule, the repetitiveness was similar. I woke up, went to my 9 a.m. class, sat through an hour and a half PowerPoint lecture, and took a quiz every Wednesday. Repeat. It was predictable, and if variation occurred, there would be unrest. Students don’t like change; school is hard enough as it is. Repetition in movement created a structure that was supposed to engage and help us learn more and at the time I really thought that it did.

Now I’m not saying I didn’t know the real world wasn’t like this, but wow has this really hit hard over the past two months since starting my job as an executive assistant for a green infrastructure company. What was once rigid in my life is now fluid, stretchy, and ever-changing.

I chose this job because I wanted to be a part of creating a network of green spaces to help aid in climate change adaptation and mitigation. Green infrastructure is generally inaccessible to many individuals, and I also wanted to work somewhere that increased accessibility, well-being, and climate protection regardless of socioeconomic status.

My role is less about science and research and more about ensuring things get done, which is really satisfying. We operate all over the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest, and our projects range from large-scale residential green roofs in Los Angeles to urban agricultural vocational programming for youth with disabilities in Brooklyn. Additionally, artists run my company so every aspect of our projects has a large emphasis on artistic design. Essentially, everything we do is based on creativity and innovation, which makes the projects we take on fluid. No green roof or green wall is installed the same.

Because we operate over a large area and manage such diverse projects, I have worked from 12 different locations all over New York, New Jersey, Nevada and California in the past two months. My workdays have ranged from 2-12 hour days. Sometimes I have woken up at 6 a.m. to make calls to plant nurseries on the other side of the country to order sedum. Sometimes I work from home, an office, an airplane, a construction site, and even the actual desert.

Sometimes I am working on a construction site in Hoboken and in the sun for 8 hours or sometimes I am sitting on my computer at WeWork all day yearning to go outside. There are days where I get sucked into long meetings, and it feels that maybe no work actually got done at all.

What I am trying to say is that my days are sometimes unpredictable, and I am starting to realize many jobs are like this. There are days when I start one task, but everything gets overhauled due to a project change and that’s OK. Productivity in most workplaces cannot simply be defined by checking tasks off a list. It isn’t realistic because projects are constantly evolving and changes can be made at any moment. And because of this newfound reality, I am learning to be flexible. I have goals and expectations in my workplace every day, but I let them shift. The reality of working in some fields is that everything changes, and that’s OK. Maybe these changes will even make work fun.