Today was the first of two days of evaluation sims. These sims are always uber-stressful because people are watching you and taking notes on your every move. Fortunately for me, neither day involves an evaluation of me. Ha!
This morning was Bini’s midpoint. Bini works in my old group and is my first official trainee, since she is training to be an ARD Support, the position that I certified for six months ago. The midpoint is an “easier” evaluation in the sense that you can’t fail. It’s not designed to be the final test of whether you can function as a console operator even when the world is coming apart around you. Instead, it’s simply a hard sim designed to challenge you beyond what you’ve seen thus far in your training, expose your weaknesses, and give your trainer a good idea of how you’re progressing.
I found out that it’s much more fun to be the evaluator than the evaluatee (yes, I know, that’s probably not a word). I also found out that I shouldn’t make fun of Marc, the guy who trained me, for the novel-length “narrative summary” he’d hand me a few days after each of my evaluations. It turns out that it takes a lot of writing to cover everything thoroughly, and being thorough is very helpful to your trainee. I filled the front and back of a sheet of paper with my handwriting scribbles — for each individual run. Four runs is four sheets of paper. When I organize all my thoughts and type it out, it will also be novel-length.
After the sim, I told Bini that even though I’d said it wasn’t a pass/fail evaluation, she passed. And she did. She did great. She has exactly the strengths and weaknesses that I would expect for someone who is halfway through their training. In fact, I think she may have done better than I expected. Excellent.
Tomorrow is Jose’s Rendezvous Support cert qual. It’s the “pre-final” before your final certification sim. It’s usually the hardest sim that you see in all of your training, even harder than the final, since it’s really designed to make sure that you’re ready for a final. Tomorrow there are five evaluations on the schedule in so many disciplines that it will be amazing if the fake shuttle manages to dock in one piece. Evaluations mean one thing: trouble. Tomorrow there will be lots of trouble. It’s a Data Processing Systems final front room cert, so there will be major problems with the computers. There are backroom evaluations for guidance, communications, and propulsion, so there will be problems with all of those systems. And the piece de resistance — all of those systems affect rendezvous. So all of those systems affect Jose.
I’m watching so that when my turn comes, I can tell myself that “it can’t possibly be as bad as his cert qual!”
George says
Evaluatee is a perfectly good word.