A Terrible Mistake at Work and the Lessons I Learned

How to avoid making a mistake, and what to do after you have made it

Back in university, shortly after graduating, I worked for a summer as an orientations coordinator. Orientations, for a lot of universities, is huge and is planning out everything that happens on the first day for first years, mature students, international students, and more.

I applied and was grateful that they accepted me, based on my technical knowledge. There were three separate Orientations Coordinator positions, and one of them was more technical than others and involved sorting students into groups (cohorts), mail merging, and then mailing out invitations to them letting them know what cohort they were with and who their student squad leader was, among other details.

That position landed on my plate. I was a bit worried about the technical part of sorting the students into groups, but found out that a small program had been developed that would do all the sorting needed for me. What was handy though was being able to look at the code and to see what it was doing, then to tweak it as needed.

Once the sorting was completed, I exported the students and their information into spreadsheets where I would manipulate it further. Some students may drop out. We may add…