Ok, so now that we've given you a bit of a sense of why we're here (and of course continue to ask for clarification and we'll provide it), let's go back to what we're doing. We arrived in Chennai last Tuesday night, and we stayed at a hostel affiliated with our work until Sunday-ish. Then on Sunday, Jeff and most of the other RA's left for the beach resort where we are right now, in Mahabalipuram. I came a day late because I needed to finish registering as an employed foreigner (a lengthy process).
And now we're here at the RA meet, and I'm writing from the most comfortable bed I will ever sleep on in India. The resort is amazing. Everyone had been hyping it so much that I thought I would have unreasonable expectations of its awesomeness, but it really is gorgeous - greenery everywhere, a huge pool, right near the beach, ridiculously sumptuous buffets and the most hypervigilant service I've ever seen - we routinely have to reassure the staff that no it's ok, we don't want a third scoop of ice cream… because we have ice cream for dessert at both lunch and dinner! And anyone who knows me knows how delighted this makes me.
As a sidenote: the ice cream issue is a funny one, since India has notoriously bad ice cream (when it's available at all). I was chatting with a guy who grew up in Delhi, but who had gone to the U.S. for a summer internship, and he asked me, all wide eyed, if I had heard of "Ben and Jerry" because he said it was the best thing he'd ever tasted and he would go to the grocery store just to buy some. Just imagine, for those of you who have had the fortune to taste Toscanini's or Grater's, what he would have thought! One of the other RA's in Patna informed me last night that there was this big news article because Patna just got Baskin Robbins, so perhaps there's some hope for me there….
But really, we're not here to eat ice cream. They have us working from 8am - 8pm, no joke, which is exhausting but also exciting, especially now that the sessions have begun to move away from the theoretical background of RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials, what we do) and into more of the nitty gritty tips for how to run successful projects. We're also broken into groups of about 6, and each group is given a different real J-PAL project that we're supposed to design the sketch of an impact evaluation for. We meet for a few hours a day, and we're supposed to present our conclusions tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes :).
So who knew several months ago that I would now (mostly) know how to calculate statistical power? To be honest, as the material covered in the training moves closer to logistical management and planning, I'm feeling increasingly confident that I wasn't the "admissions mistake" - my brain went into overdrive when one of the presenters was talking about putting together a training for our survey teams (which apparently they don't have a handbook for yet in India, so that's something that probably a group of RA's will work on). Needless to say that it did not during our 4 hour session on statistical power, despite the awesomeness of the presenter.
And that's something else too - we are incredibly blessed in having an amazing executive staff. I haven't been naming any names because, while I know that only a few people will read this, all blogs are public documents (so I apologize if my stories sometimes sound vague or confusing!). But yeah, I could not be happier with the people that I'm working for, and I feel really comfortable going to any of them with questions or concerns, which is definitely not something to take for granted.
Oh and the title is the name of one of our dishes at lunch yesterday. It was actually pretty tasty, although lord only knows what was in it...
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