A Foot in the Door

After returning from our wonderful long weekend along the Great Ocean Road, I, personally had a crazy week of WORK! That's right folks, I actually went to work. :) For those who do not know, I have only worked for about 5 weeks since arriving in August, when I was placed in temp job (which was fantastic, but not in my line of work) during the months of October and November. I have had several other job offers since then, but these jobs were not in my field and I was really holding out for the chance to find my ideal job in Oz. To be honest, I'm still not sure what the ideal job is for me here, seeing as my profession does not exist in this country. However, I am working hard to try to find my professional "niche" here in Melbourne so that I can work at a job that I feel passionate about.

On Monday, I went to 3 different jobs! The first was teaching a Sports Trainer course to a group called SEDA. Basically these students are in "grade 13" and they are working towards work placement in the health/fitness/sports/recreation field or they are trying to get into a university program. I was the head lecturer and I had 2 assistants to help me (there are 50 students in the class). I thoroughly enjoyed teaching even though the class seemed more interested in asking me questions about American than they did about the Sports Trainer course. One step at a time. :) Later that day, I went to job #2, at a local school that has an athlete development program. Promising Aussie athletes are given a free education at this school where many students spend half of their day training for their given sport(s) (sounds like my kind of school!). The "rehab coordinator" was on his honeymoon, so I was asked to fill in for him. I have to thank a former athlete, Kendall Fletcher, for helping me get an "in" at this school, because she dragged me over there to meet the head of their athlete development program. In addition, one of Erik's supervisors had written an email to someone at the school mentioning that my skills and background could be beneficial to their students. Basically I worked with injured athletes who had been seen by the physios (like physical therapists). I am unable to assess/diagnose injuries in Australia, which is not only strange but totally unfortunate because I could be much more of an asset to the school if that was the case. I'm in collaboration with a few people who are working to get athletic training recognized as a profession here, and hopefully that will happen before we leave this country! Later that evening, I stopped by footy practice of the team that I will be working part-time for this season. It is a small, local club that needed some extra help, and I'm excited to learn more about the game of footy and to get to know the guys who play for the club.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I was back at the school, and on Thursday I taught another SEDA course where this time, I was an assistant. Friday I also worked at the school, but left in the middle of the day to complete a brief orientation for job #5, as I will be teaching labs and tutorials for a Human Physiology course at the university where Erik works. I'm extremely excited about doing some college-level teaching, but also a bit nervous because I have a lot of material to review before starting to teach the first lab, which happens to be this Friday! On Saturday, I taught an all-day Sports First Aid course (similar to American Red Cross First Aid and CPR) to a small group of students. Again, I really enjoyed teaching the material and the students I had were fantastic. One of the students is actually currently enrolled in a Sports Therapy program, which seems to be the best career comparison to athletic training that I've found here, and apparently the director of the program is an ATC hailing from the United States! I'll be contacting him this week to see if there is any chance of doing some teaching or mentoring in their program.

Needless to say, I've got my foot in the door at a few potential workplaces now, which I am thrilled about! I'm hopeful that through one or more of these avenues I can find the ideal job for the remainder of our time abroad. I find it hilarious that I've gone from no jobs to several jobs all at once, but I think that these roles came just at the right time because I was certainly getting restless being unemployed!

Since I worked on Saturday, we were a bit limited as to what we could get into this weekend. Today we biked to the beach (this is bay beach we are talking about so no waves but beautiful refreshing water), which is about 10 miles or 30-ish minutes from our house (depending on which way the wind is blowing...we had a ferocious headwind on the way home and it took more like 50 minutes!). The weather here lately has been beautiful and rather warm, yesterday it reached 99 degrees F, but I find that it rarely feels hot because the humidity is so low. Anyway, we spent a pleasant afternoon relaxing in the sun at Williamstown Beach. I played around with Instagram on my iPhone to try to capture the beautiful day, the the picture really doesn't do the setting justice. Lots of work this week for me again, so this was a great way to finish the weekend and start the work week!